In the stories about life and death, the soul often floats above the goodbye moment, hovering over police cars at highway accidents, or clinging like a spider to hospital room ceilings. These are people who receive a second chance, who somehow, for some reason, resume their place in the world. Eddie, it appeared, was not getting a second chance.

How do people choose their final words? Do they realize their gravity? Are they fated to be wise?

It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired maintenance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside eve…

No story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely, like stones beneath a river.

It was close; but that's the way it is in war. You win or lose, live or die - and the difference is just an eyelash.

Routine is the death to heroism.

I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.