“Chad Lester was appalled by this dishonesty, as only a dishonest man can be. For those who have never seen this phenomenon in action, he was the kind of man who was entirely unaccustomed to looking at lies from this end of the barrel. He was now counting the rounds in their chambers. He could see their pointed, silvery tips. He licked his lips.”
Like a Little Rubber Ball
“His sentence rolled to a stop against the wall and just sat there, abandoned.”
Say Again?
“This was not because Cindi did not know how to handle her cousin Cherie, but rather because her husband was better than she was at deciphering code whenever Cherie was hysterical. And Cherie, on the other end, was speaking something like high-volume Navajo under stress.”
Inconvenient When That Happens
“John was mildly irritated, not at Cindi, but with that special kind of vaguely aimed irritation that we for ourselves when in the presence of people who are being correct in our direction.”
Which Is Pretty Indignant
“The rest of them were about as indignant as a room full of wet cats”
Evangellyfish, p.133
Unspoken Blessings
“And the earth would go around the sun ten entire times before he had finally met Cindi, who, as Puritans go, was as hot as it gets. And, John thought smugly to himself, for those who think that means ‘not very,’ he could write a book, although no Christian publisher would ever touch it. She could make him bleed from both his ears, like some very happy kind of parachute accident. John grinned inside his head.”
At Least When She Had Cell Coverage
“When he told Mystic Union about it six months ago, she had come alive. Her eyes had sparkled, just like her crystal earrings that kept her in touch with her two grandmothers, now deceased”
Not an Insignificant Problem
“Robert was astute enough to know that a statement for his attorney was not to be a creative writing exercise, and so he had to stick to the facts. But he hardly knew any facts and was thus having trouble sticking to them.”
That Is, Quickly
“If it was narcissism and self-indulgence you were after, he could write like a bat out of the bad place.”
Hypochondria Deluxe
“Robert P. Warner II had been the kind of boy in high school who managed his injuries as a mother hen hovers over her chicks. He was a master of communicating physical distress to others, but the nature of the injury and the nature of the distress he would subsequently manifest were not really in accord with the laws of logic first outlined in such a cogent way by Aristotle. One time, when he had been beaned in the forehead by a volleyball in Mr. Walker’s phys ed class, the injury, such as it was, resulted in a mild ringing in the ears. But this had translated, by the end of the period, into a clear limp; by the end of the day, into a striking limp; and by the next Monday morning, into a pair of crutches and a leg brace on the outside of his jeans.”