Gwen’s laughter impaled my imagination, sending me flying along the tropical vines with each of her exquisitely heaved guffaws.
Peter Newell
Edited illustrations from Peter Newell's "The Rocket Book" (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1912), in which a naughty boy Peter finds a rocket in the basement and sends it up through the building, where it crashes through a family's dinner table and a writer's typewriter. The writer exclaims, "I didn't mean it to be so deuced realistic!"
The Beige House
We couldn’t sit on the sofa in the house growing up. My mother didn’t allow it. The probability of spill, scratch, or rip was not entirely remote, so the couch remained shrouded in a plastic cover.
Deluxe Scrabble
When I was a kid, I had this friend named Sunshine. Sunshine’s house was filthy, and if I walked barefoot on her family’s tile floors, the soles of my feet would turn gray-black.