I bang my head on a faucet. “Careful.” Why do persons only say that after the hurt?
She gets sick of things fast, it’s from being an adult.
How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized – as a reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.
Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.
But no, I used all my brave up.
No, I mean everything feels different, but it’s because I’m different.
So then she took me home, or I took her home, or we were both somehow taken to the closest thing.
Once I was a stupid girl; now I am an angry woman.
Perhaps we get, not what we deserve, but what we demand.
I’ve been in the world three weeks and a half, I still never know what’s going to hurt.
And why must it always be presumed that a woman’s views are based on personal considerations?
I think she was too tired to play anymore, she was in a hurry to get to Heaven so she didn’t wait, why didn’t she wait for me?
One of them asked what was in my skirts to make them so heavy, and I said, Knives, and he took his hand off my thigh and never touched me again.
Keep your heart infinitesimally small and sorrow will never spy it, never plunge, never flap away with your heart in her claws.
Jack. He’d never give us a phone, or a window. “Ma takes my thumbs and squeezes them. “We are people in a book, and he wont let anybody else read it.
May there be no frost on your potatoes, nor worms in your cabbage.
We go in a skyscraper that’s Paul’s office, he says he’s crazy busy but he makes a Xerox of my hands and buys me a candy bar out of the vending machine. Going down in the elevator pressing the buttons, I play I’m actually inside a vending machine. We go in a bit of the government to get Grandma a new Social Security card because she lost the old one, we have to wait for years and years. Afterwards she takes me in a coffee shop where there’s no green beans, I choose a cookie bigger than my face.
Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib’s experience, those who wouldn’t cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they’d entered and what they’d done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives’ smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.
Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine – that was the doctors’ domain – but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation.
If Earth was such unworthy soil for God’s best specimens, why did he perversely plant them there?