Excerpts
The God of War
“Where I grew up, people kept their business to themselves. I lived in the desert, far enough east of the big cities of Southern California to render them meaningless to my daily life, closer to the border of Mexico than most people would have liked to admit. People did not so much choose to live in that parched frontier as they ended up there. It was a place generally ignored because it did not have much to offer, and so it was a place where you could be left alone. The desert's plants and animals thrived in seemingly impossible circumstances, against heat and drought and other odds. The same could have been said of its people, too.”
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No Direction Home
“Blindness will be like this. Will closes his eyes. He breathes deeply and settles into the darkness, testing it out. It isn't blackness. There is gray and red and brown. And there is texture to the darkness, too; it is a nubby plain, an ant's landscape of small rises and dips. But maybe he is seeing a sighted person's darkness, a darkness still shot through with traces of light and color and images of what he has seen moments before, when his eyes were open.”
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Babe in Paradise
“Dulcie is afraid of freeways. She doesn't like not being able to get off whenever she wants, and sometimes I catch her holding her breath between exits, as if she's driving past a graveyard. So, even though the party we went to last week was miles from our apartment in Silver Lake, we drove home on the surface streets.”
Read the rest of this excerpt from the story “What I Saw from Where I Stood.”
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