“It had been during one of those quiet and ambling days that I fell back in touch with an old favourite teacher of mine who had disappeared from our school in the winter of my final year under mysterious and unexplained circumstances.”
“But before the shriek, before the body and the stain, and the flicking on of the bare bulb, before Poonam Aunty fainted and collapsed in a bundle next to her husband's dead body, before she recovered her senses and started shrieking again, there was a celebration at Saith’s house, the only Hindu house in the whole country – and I was invited.”
He used to say, “What’s mine is yours and what’s yours is mine.” I realize now how these phrases have no meaning once you’re pitted against each other, once you need to go your separate ways.
"I remembered little of the day my mother died, and of the funeral even less. All I retained were a child's impressions: a cup of water in my hand, its surface slowly warming. Black patent shoes on a green lawn, a pair of dangling, stockinged feet. The smell of my father mingled with the stench of his cologne."
“It doesn’t help that I have no address to guide us, only a pin of a nearby park and a picture of me and Baba standing outside the front door of her place when I was an awkward teenager, squinting into the sun.”
"The billboards, giant screens, marquees are off like a giant plug was ripped out its socket. No cash on me, only a bundle of heroin and a useless Metrocard."
"Sometimes, when you live through hard times with loved ones—people you think you know best—old layers of their personalities begin to peel away and from underneath, shines through a new skin."
Coupled with her Tannie Sallie being ill, her mama and Elsie’s death and everything that had happened in this camp, her little mind was so sure that more cruelty would kill her.
In photography class, you had learned to control your breathing, to narrow your focus and attention and direct it at one external object outside of you.
My father and his younger brother tried to make me a man by forcing me to learn how to fish. Towards the end of my fourteenth winter, as soon as the lake thawed, my father wanted his father to begin training me.
I don’t believe that I will ever like Michelle, even though I love who she is when she is my brother. I want to accept the arrangement, but I am still having trouble processing the fact that the person I rely on is not him.
I speak to my leg hair as I would speak to myself. Which is to say: with suspicion. Which is to say: with one ear trained to the sounds of a door opening and closing.
No doubt the reason we knew the animals so well was because my father was a vet, and so his life and our livelihood were fundamentally entangled with the lives of other creatures.
Hamish was overwhelmed by the intensity...as if everything had been assembled just so, just right, in that moment for the two of them, coming around the corner.
He wasn’t sure when she began mentioning the curse. Later, when he looked back, he realized she’d said the word with alarming frequency since his arrival, spoken with the naturalness of words like bread and bicycle.
I had every right to inhabit a space. If I were in Madrid to simply drink and eat and wander the city, I should be able to do so without being accused of mediocrity by the locals.
No one knew where the FTs came from. Like the basketball that hit you in the nose out of nowhere, they just materialized in front of us and walked into our life with their long legs.
Everyone joked about how the two brothers’ names had become their destinies. Sihai, four oceans. A man forever moving. Weijia, settle down. A man who makes a home.
Everything is suspended, and into the void steps a powerful curiosity which draws them out of the bedroom and downstairs to see the truth of it for themselves.
Once she spied Ellen in front of her computer, dancing. It was the most beautiful thing, the way her arms snaked as if they were channeling some old poetry.
A middle-aged woman at the front desk yelled: Welcome to the new dimension! Her uniform was tight but also disheveled. Her eyelids were lacquered in turquoise shadow.
You tunneled into reason: that many earthlings you had observed had enjoyed ecstatic many moments already where they had relaxed into the comfort of being invisible.
