When your parent clocks out before you clock in, you can spend way too much of your life staring into that black hole.
Two dead wasps lay on the sill with their heads close together like a tiny murder-suicide.
We’ve got story enough here to eff up more than one young life, but it is a project.
OxyContin, God’s gift for the laid-off deep-hole man with his back and neck bones grinding like bags of gravel. For the bent-over lady pulling double shifts at Dollar General with her shot knees and ADHD grandkids to raise by herself.
But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now they’d all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once you’ve gone over, you’re over.
A ten-year-old getting high on pills. Foolish children. This is what we’re meant to say: Look at their choices, leading to a life of ruin. But lives are getting lived right now, this hour, down in the dirty cracks between the toothbrushed nighty-nights and the full grocery carts, where those words don’t pertain.
Like every boy in Lee County I was raised to be a proud mule in a world that has scant use for mules.
I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.
Willa wondered how many tuition dollars they’d invested in this conversation, and whether she could get a refund; she wished they would all shut up and eat.
For a minute the Sun came out, while it was snowing. People say that means the devil is beating his wife.
Ugly as homemade sin.
Stoner asks what I think I’m doing. I tell him I am mopping the floor, spelled with a silent As you can plainly see, dumbass.
There will always be those that look down on your station in life and call it a sty, but if you get in there and wallow, that’s on you.
The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.
Emmy said Kent and June didn’t use weapons, just mouths, both parties packing serious heat in that department. Kent was a yeller, but mouthwise, June was an AR-15. Instant reload, engineered to kill.
She said don’t ever be pregnant during the lead-up to Halloween because it will put you off candy corn for life. I told her thanks for the advice.
I was born to wish for more than I can have.
First, I got myself born.
No credit given for all the extra miles that take you nowhere.
She sounded like a man, with that deep voice smokers get as their prize for their hundred millionth pack.