Pick a side? You done picked the wrong side.

The ground had opened up and spit out hell, Nell thought, and the detritus was Shiloh.

It wasn’t that Nell was weak. It was that the world was dangerous.

Sometimes the smoke from the factories and riverboats and trains would obscure the night sky entirely. But the town's industrial breath was blowing somewhere else tonight, and so the Armstrong house was bathed in starlight. Nell studied the little white specks, like glittering dust on black velvet, and she asked,

"You boys ever wonder what it'd be like to be somewhere else?

The Iraq war fueled distrust of the press from both sides.

She parted her lips as though she were going to scold him, but, after a moment of sitting with her mouth agape like a fish, thought the better of it.