Jim was spraying black paint on the last of the windows when he saw the cat emerge from the hedge of arbor vitae at the back of the yard—an unusual tortoiseshell cat with a wild mix of reds, blacks, and browns in its fur. All the confusing colors distracted for a moment from the fact that the cat’s head was missing.
Since the night she died, she’s been called beautiful five thousand, two hundred and seven times by five thousand, two hundred and seven different tenientes. Each one has his own, peculiar stiffness as he clings to her, as his veneer of restraint chars and peels back like pages in a burning book.
They shared an apartment where William knew the landlord, where nobody asked questions. Leo learned to ignore the strange bumps and creases of his neighbors’ clothes. He was safe among the modified; their crimes, their sins, were so much greater than his own. And in that safety he could forget, as long as possible, what lay ahead.
Since the season of the stinging rains struck only every three or four years, plans to enlarge and improve the below-ground nests always wriggled to the back of people’s minds as soon as the sun returned and the stink of burning faded from the air.
Sightseers come to Dragon’s Beach, but they don’t stay long. The rough glass of the beach is too dangerous to walk on, the earth crumbles horribly beneath your feet, and besides, there isn’t anything to see. Just a weird rock formation and some holes in the ground.
I was eleven years old when I realized that my mother was a ghost. I can remember the exact moment of this realization, but I wish I could better explain how it came about. It was like I had all these broken pieces of the truth, like shards of a white bowl, and in one moment, the pieces flew together, reforming the bowl, like the instant of its shattering running in reverse.
They told me they’d found her at the bottom of a cliff in the mountains, not even bruised. They looked, but they couldn’t find where she’d come from. And then they couldn’t find anybody to foster care her. I felt sad just as I do for all the creatures in my care. I took her in right away.
It was Jeffrey who had wanted to go to the bookstore after school. Jeffrey, Emily had discovered after he moved in with them, read constantly. He read in the morning while he ate his cereal. He read whenever he finished an assignment before everyone else in class, which was pretty much all the time.
Steve was just north of Chaffeys Lock driving back from Rachel’s house in Ottawa when he saw the snake on the road. If he’d been with Rachel he wouldn’t have stopped. Rachel wouldn’t have noticed it, but if he had pointed it out to her, she would have shut her eyes and ordered him to drive on…
The bees come: one, and another, and a swarm. He has no fruit left for them, but when he tries to tell them so, his tongue cleaves to his teeth. They speak to him, in the manner of bees, of the clover and the phlox, the apple-blossoms and the Queen Anne’s lace . . .
