Passing through the hallway on their way out, her sisters tipped their heads in the direction of the statue of the goddess Durga. They did it automatically, almost imperceptibly, and with wide, innocent eyes, like spies letting their handler know they had seen him and he should hold his position. Oma did the same, but with less conviction. It was one of many casual gestures of defiance on the part of the sisters. Their parents, aunts, and grandparents had offered unsatisfactory and conflicting answers to the question of why, since they did not believe in gods, their houses were filled with Hindu icons. Oma disliked it when her sisters interrogated their parents and shot glances at one another waiting for the elders to flounder, but she reluctantly played her part in the rituals her sisters established to confound them. She tipped her head to the goddess and moved along. The goddess both frightened and fascinated her, with her eight weaponized arms and peaceful expression.

“My client is feeling very insecure this week,” Stebbins said, swinging his feet up onto the leather couch, leaning his head back against the paper antimacassar, and lighting up a large cigar.

They had finished reading War and Peace, and now they were celebrating their triumph at a Russian supper club in Brighton Beach. There were twelve of them seated at the long table (“Just like that painting of what’s-his-name’s dinner, minus what’s-his-name,” Kyla said brightly), and, well, Derek assumed that at least half had probably finished War and Peace. Or, fine: he imagined it was safe to say that, on the whole, the table had at least started reading War and Peace.

I snapped my leg in two and lost the summer—six months on crutches and I’d be lucky if I didn’t limp for the rest of my life. I went to the ground for a slide tackle in a pickup soccer game and felt what turned out to be my tibia shoot through my skin. 

The ants had gotten in through the shattered bottom half of Leslie’s laptop screen. Now they crawled across her green- and blue-tinted Word documents and websites one or two at a time 

On Christmas Eve I wandered around my mother’s house looking for things to wrap. For the last three days I’d been slamming doors and doing cocaine and forgetting that it was the season of giving.

He felt as though the psychologist had uncovered a secret about him and was waiting until this day to tell him.

In the airport limousine on the way into New Orleans, the driver says, “See that cemetery we’re passing? In New Orleans, no one is buried underground—dig five feet and you hit water.

Liz woke up at three A.M., when she recognized Danny’s car rumbling into the driveway. It had a hole in the muffler. Then she heard the car turn around and speed down the street. 

Of course I’ve heard of the Circus Trots. In May 1940, Comrade Pinardier (for that was his nom de guerre, not his name) found himself in Brussels, cut off by the German invasion. With his militant Trotskyist past, how could he get out from under the net?