The Vanishing Half

That was the thrill of youth, the idea that you could be anyone.

This was comfort, no longer wanting anything.

Sometimes who you were came down to the small things.

You couldn’t separate the shame from being caught doing something from the shame of the act itself

The line cook wondered if it had been Desiree after all, since Lou was turning sixty in May and still too vain to wear his eyeglasses.

In that little farm town, nothing surprising ever happened, not since the Vignes twins had disappeared.

She knew he missed this, not sun-dappled beaches or frozen city sidewalks but brown countryside rolling flat into acres of woods.

That was the thing about death. Only the specifics of it hurt. Death, in a general sense, was background noise. She stood in the silence of it.

When she’d first moved to Los Angeles, she’d found the traffic a little beautiful. All those people going places.

Her daughter, who would forever be the only person in her life who really knew her.