The Point Of Flight. To Get Rid

She Takes Another Long Haul, Lets The Smoke Settle In Her Lungs-- She Has Heard Somewhere That Cigarettes Are Good For Grief. One Long Drag And You Forget How To Cry. The Body Too Busy Dealing With The Poison.

Let This Be A Lesson To Us All, Said The Preacher. You Will Be Walking Someday In The Dark And The Truth Will Come Shining Through, And Behind You Will Be A Life That You Never Want To See Again.

Stories Are The Best Democracy We Have. We Are Allowed To Become The Other We Never Dreamed We Could Be.

...and It Strikes Her, As She Walks, That Borders, Like Hatred, Are Exaggerated Precisely Because Otherwise They Would Cease To Exist Altogether.

I Love Short Stories. They're Like Small Imploding Universes. They Are Very Tightly Bound And Controlled. I'd Been Wanting To Write One For Ages But Just Got Tangled Up In Novels. The Novel Is The Same In The Sense That It Is Also A Universe, But It Explodes Outwards With All That Shrapnel Going In Several Different Directions. I Don't See Too Much Difference In The Forms Except For The Fact That Writing Short Stories Is Like Sprinting Rather Than Long-distance Running.