Paper is first year,′ I said. At the end of Year One’s unexpectedly wrenching treasure hunt, Amy presented me with a set of posh stationery, my initials embossed at the top, the paper so creamy I expected my fingers to come away moist. In return, I’d presented my wife with a bright red dime-store paper kite, picturing the park, picnics, warm summer gusts. Neither of us liked our presents; we’s each have preferred the other’s. It was a reverse O. Henry.
DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.
I like other people’s things better. They come with other people’s history.
There was just me, left wretched in my childhood bed.
I wanted to slice barren into my skin. That’s how I’d stay, my insides unused. Empty and pristine. I pictured my pelvis split open, to reveal a tidy hollow, like the nest of a vanished animal.
Only Tanner Bolt could get away with making me, a client, fly to him, then tell me what kind of dance I’d need to do in order to give him my money.
I stared back – cows are the few animals that really seem to see you.
For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.
Against the far wall was a wire cage holding a pack of unblinking bunnies. World’s dumbest pet, I thought. Who would want an animal that sat, quivered, and shat everywhere? They say you can litter-box train them, but they lie.
It is always consoling to think of suicide; it’s what gets one through many a bad night.
Patty knew that feeling, a dream hangover, like when she jumped up from a panicky sleep at 2 in the morning and tried to talk herself into thinking the farm was OK, that this year would pick up, and then felt all the sicker when she woke up to the alarm a few hours later, guilty and duped. It was suprising that you could spend hours in the middle of the night pretending things were OK, and know in thirty seconds of daylight that that simply wasn’t so.′ -Dark Places.
I don’t know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
It was one of the few stories we told the same way.
If you don’t have money, gossip isn’t bad leverage. Even inside one’s own family.
I remember always being baffled by other children. I would be at a birthday party and watch the other kids giggling and making faces, and I would try to do that too, but I wouldn’t understand why. I would sit there with the tight elastic thread of the birthday hat parting the pudge of my underchin, with the grainy frosting of the cake bluing my teeth, and I would try to figure out why it was fun. With Nick, I understood finally. Because he was so much fun. It was like dating a sea otter.
What kind of woman gets slaughtered by her own son?
All the women here walked as if they were pushing against a monstrous headwind.
People do what they’re supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation – they’re.
When you finally stop an itch and realize it’s because you’ve ripped a hole in your skin.
But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.