“I love these because I love thinking about you looking at me,” she said. “It’s a very particular kind of vanity.”

Oliver closed the computer. Out the window, a hummingbird appeared, attracted by the morning glory that grew on that wall of my house. It hovered and looked in at us quizzically, its iridescent chest hanging still in space, its wings nearly invisible with speed. We were sitting at a busy intersection of realities. We could feel the celestial wind.

The insides of my eyelids glowed blood-orange.

One guard was all you needed because he might be watching at any time, and the idea of being watched matters way more than actually being watched.

Dawn had been a red slit, night sliced open with a scalpel, with the bristly silhouettes of Joshua trees raising their clubbed arms against it.

“That’s what I mean. Things might be better without anyone to worry about.” He leans forward, his folded arms sliding on the table. “That’s not true. That would be the most terrible loneliness.”

October leans into November. The trees are tipped with gold, the cottonwoods bright as apricot flesh. The landscape flares and shimmers.

At dinner, he had seen her for what she was. She’d felt the force of his recognition like a slap.

they wouldn’t like the books if the story gave them exactly what they wanted.