small-town

Before she could ponder what on earth he meant or come up with a proper response, he took their charade a step further.He kissed her.

How old are you?___ld enough to know better, but still young enough to do it again.

I don__ want to go home yet._ He twisted at the waist and patted the seat behind him. __ake a walk on the wild side with me.

Doubt filled her eyes. __hat are we betting for, anyway?__e hadn__ thought about that, but it took his brain all of three seconds to come up with an answer. He knew damn well what he wanted from her. Had for years.__ kiss._ The words slipped from his lips before he could stop them, but once out, he didn__ want to take them back. __ne kiss after you come back and see she__ all right.

You're gonna have to hold on tight, because this rodeo is just getting started.

You want a wild ride, J.J.? I'll give it to you, hard and slow until you scream my name.

I must say, cowboy, I'm impressed. I was worried you could only handle eight seconds at a time.

For the record, you would've been my first one night stand.

Small-town boy meets big-time evil.

I'm the girl who's desperate to get out of her small town because if she doesn't she knows she'll die. She knows her soul will start to rot, like fruit gone bad.

This was a normal town once, and we were normal people. Most of us worked at the plastics factory on the outskirts of town. Then one day there was an accident... something escaped from the factory, a yellow gas. It floated over the town so fast that we didn't see it, didn't realize... and then it was too late, and Dark Falls wasn't a normal town anymore.

It's difficult being an intellectual in a bread and butter sort of town.

He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.

It__ an immense night out there, wheeling and windy. The lights on the street and in the houses against the black wetness, little unilluminating glints that might be painted on it. The town seems huddled together, cowering on a high tiny perch, afraid to move lest it topple into the wind.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Alford, Massachusetts: Mandy stood there with her old Nikon film camera, snapping photo after photo of the rural landscape. It was difficult to describe the wonderful feeling of there not being a single cell phone in sight; the only modern technology around was the faint blue glow of a cathode ray tube television in the window of a nearby house, and a few cars and trucks parked in crumbling gravel driveways. She was allowed to see this place, one that would likely be ruined by the 21st century as time went on_ places like these were extremely hard to find these days. A world of wood-burning cookstoves and the waxy smell of Paraffin, laundry hung out to dry, rusty steel bridges over streams that reflected the bright blue skies, apple pies left out on windowsills_ a world of hard work with very little to show for it aside from the sunlight beaming down on a proud community. And Mandy wanted to trap it all in her Kodak film rolls and rescue it from the future.

Sometimes it was hard to breathe, knowing how small my world could be. Maybe in San Francisco it wouldn't feel like the universe was conspiring to keep me in a bubble.

No matter what you do, someone always knew you would.