Sublime

Em had a slight lankiness to her. She wasn’t just slim, she was skinny, scrawny maybe, in a way Pat noticed other women noticing.

Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released.

Thompson, tireless and unrelenting, brought her case to the Minnesota Court of Appeals. There her lawyers argued eloquently that it was “astonishing” that a judge would issue an order that would “have the effect of limiting Sharon Kowalski’s contact with Thompson and the love Karen feels for her.” The lawyers demanded to know, “In what moral framew

Melissa did not want Ria and Blake to grow up with this sound, to develop the hardness that enabled you to become insensitive to it. She wanted them to live somewhere calmer, somewhere greener, somewhere the emergency services were less busy, so that they in turn could be calm, and keep the purity of themselves.

Grace Macaulay, then: seventeen, small and plump, with skin that went brown by the end of May. Her hair was black and oily, and had the hot consoling scent of an animal in summer. She disliked books, and was by nature a thief if she found a thing to be beautiful, but not hers. She didn’t know she couldn’t sing. She was inclined to be cross.

“Gertrude moved her large face close to mine. ‘You know, Hemingway, you’re someone I created, a macho character who roams the earth looking for adventure. The truth is, under pressure you have proved to be quite yellow, which is really an embarrassment to me.’