Good words

A decade of the soldiers posted in the villages has instilled a healthy dose of fear, coating the villagers’ teeth like a plaque they can taste any time their tongues press up to speak.

An exhalation jerked out of Matti in three parts, nearly soundless.

But their characters might have been two roads in a yellow wood: they could not have diverged more.

Each row home is designed like a cadaver lying flat on a table: at the prow of the apartment is an abbreviated entryway that normally holds Adina’s kicked-off boots and her mother’s neatly arranged work pumps, hallway like a throat leading to the open kitchen, the torso a family room big enough to hold a couch and a half-moon table covered in the

Every so often the passing 7 train dismantles her.

One particular model on Anthropologie’s website appears to be in perpetual agony. She startles Adina as she scrolls the store’s wares: a smile, a beatific glance, then her: devastated. In a hip-length top, a flowy jumpsuit, a drop-waisted wrap dress, she is inconsolable. So different from the other models, pleasant and isolated in their editorial

Adina realizes friendships are reincarnations.

Without Beecher, true, there’d be no circus; but without Felix, there’d be no show.

ragged to the extent of being filigree,