Paul Russell

Was there anything quite so painful, so fraught with the possibilities of hurt, as gift giving within a family?

Chris is a little ashamed of having once fallen for him: it makes him sad how everything changes, how ruthless the heart can be.

Why not simply surrender to one__ doom, since one was so clearly, so spectacularly, doomed?

Our students didn__ used to come from such damaged families,_ Louis mused. __t__ true what they say. This country really is coming apart at the seams.

The angel descended when you were least expecting it. Tracy felt something quietly go click in his despairing heart.

My darlings! You can hardly expect an aged crone like me to mar such a lovely event. No, I shall remain here and knit shadows. Now go forth and shine bravely, and think of nothing but love.

That__ the way Chris lives, warning everyone who gets close of the lightning that may strike. Never touch anything, never make a mark. But Anatole can__ live that way. The world__ too lonely a place: he has to touch things, he has to put his arms around them.

Absolutely, love matters,_ she reiterated. __e forget that at our own risk.

You get exactly what you want, Anatole__ always suspected, only when you get it it__ no longer what you want, you need something else.

He wanted to toast mad idealism, forbidden desires, the dreams that drove one to criminal acts. He wanted, quite starkly, oblivion.

Tracy had never been so conscious of the sky above the earth, the dangerous clouds that gathered there, the way humans lived beneath such grandeur and threat every moment of their lives.

Shirtless, they__ stretch out in the long grass and take the healing brunt of a noontime sun that gave no clue of the thunderheads it already, in secret, had begun to breed.

If certain places you came to in life felt right, then how many others were just as clearly the wrong place to be?

Still, the illusion of love had, in its time, led to stranger depravities.

It is Halloween,_ he explains coyly. __ wanted to come out as something beautiful. None of this witch stuff for me. My God, don__ we spend our whole life as witches?

Do you even know what gay stands for? Well, let me tell you. G-A-Y. Got Aids yet?

Love loves anarchy. It loves to wreak havoc. It loves to dance atop the ruins.

Despite his care, Reid was still playing with fire, the kind that could without warning sheathe one__ whole life in irreversible conflagration.