The way my face is without a jaw, my throat just ends in sort of a hole with my tongue hanging out. Around the hole, the skin is all scar tissue: dark red lumps and shiny the way you’d look if you got the cherry pie in a pie eating contest. If I let my tongue hang down, you can see the roof of my mouth, pink and smooth as the inside of a crab’s back, and hanging down around the roof is the white vertebrae horseshoe of the upper teeth I have left.
In Hell, whenever the demons announce they’re going to treat everyone to a big-name Hollywood movie, don’t get too excited because it’s always The English Patient or, unfortunately, The Piano. It’s never The Breakfast Club.
Either a prehistoric flying dinosaur awakened by a nuclear test is about to destroy the people downstairs or their television’s too loud. In.
Think about the animals used in product testing. Think about the monkeys shot into space. Without their death, their pain, without their sacrifice, we would have nothing.
It seemed like that moment would last forever. That you had to risk your life to get love. You had to get right to the edge of death to ever be saved.
Then she turns on the television, some soap opera, you know, real people pretending to be fake people with made-up problems being watched by real people to forget their real problems.
Do NOT die while wearing cheap shoes.
We ourselves, will resurrect the memory in order to savor it and carry it forth into the world. We will fling it at one another for laughs. Distort it. We will toss the story into the air at parties and howl over its ripeness. Degraded as it was, we will degrade it further. Make it more swollen. We shall render it impossibly awful, making of it the mythology of ourselves. A comfort. Proof of the trials we’ve survived.
You melt and swell at that moment. For that moment, nothing matters. Look up at the stars and you’re gone. Not your luggage. Nothing matters. Not your bad breath. The windows are dark outside and the horns are blaring around you. The headlights are flashing high and low and high in your face, and you will never have to go to work again.
When they were in school, Peter used to say that everything you do is a self-portrait. It might look like ‘Saint George and the Dragon’ or ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women,’ but the angle you use, the lighting, the composition, the technique, they’re all you. You are every color and brushstroke.
What you end up doing,” the mechanic says, “is you spend your life searching for a father and God.
I see the strongest and the smartest men who have ever lived,” he says, his face outlined against the stars in the driver’s window, “and these men are pumping gas and waiting tables.” The drop of his forehead, his brow, the slope of his nose, his eyelashes and the curve of his eyes, the plastic profile of his mouth, talking, these are all outlined in black against the stars.
Stink for privacy, the new way to protect personal space. Intimidation by odor.
A cigarette, a sip, a question; breathing, drinking and asking, she demonstrates all the basic applications for the human mouth.
This is your last chance, honey,” Brandy says, and her blood is getting all over the place. She says, “Do you love me?” It’s when folks ask questions like this that you lose the spotlight.
The big question people ask isn’t ‘What’s the nature of existence?’ the mouth says. ‘The big question people ask is ‘What’s that from?
Masochism is a valuable job skill. It is in most jobs.
You had a near-life experience,” the mechanic says.
What you run from only stays with you longer. When you fight something, you only make it stronger.
Every age brought its specific terror. As a boy, Felix had lain awake, afraid the house would burn down. As a youth, he’d dreaded bullies. Later, it was conscription into the army. Or the fear of not learning a trade. Or never finding a wife. After school, his career. After his son was born, he feared everything. His secret dream was to face down such a horror that it would leave him inoculated. He’d never suffer fear of anything, ever again. These.