We’re loaded down with tampons and pads, and Mom’s heading straight for the cute checker’s lane. Seriously? I’d die if I had to stand there while he rung us out. It’s obvious, right? I totally get it, she’s distracted, sad about Lance and all that, but right now we’ve got bigger issues. I steer her toward the old lady’s lane.
Ms. Solevacj was in the middle of her 72-lap morning mile, the early sluggishness in her muscles burned off, leaving her feeling strong, a machine gliding through the water. This was why she swam, to reach this Zen-like headspace, her mind and body simultaneously relaxed and stimulated. In this state, and only in this state, she could think clearly, almost calmly, about the Smiler virus.
A year after the explosion, the shell fragments pushing through Hobson’s skin are slow torture.
We were pressed against the back wall behind a tangle of dresses and hangers, the Boone’s Farm in our stomachs rising against the reek of moth balls.
“I’m going to be an entomologist,” Isabelle says. Her dress doesn’t have a pocket, or she’d have brought one of her pets. Her hands feel empty.
Trees creak in the steady wind rushing off the foothills.
Trustafarians dash from coffee shop couches into the streets to spin like bearded dust devils, worshipping the wind. They call the winds chinooks, just like the locals, not that they’ve met many of those. Rare birds, those locals.
As the clock struck midnight, ushering in my fiftieth birthday, . . .
In a collapsed hall, an echoing crunch truncates panicked screaming . . .
