A magician came to entertain us, and I was mesmerized by his beautiful hands, his fluid, round gestures. I couldn’t stop watching his hands. They were better than any of his tricks. He pulled a bouquet of paper flowers out of the air and gave them to me with a courtly bow, and I thought love was like that, pulled out of the air, something bright and unlikely.
She couldn’t help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn’t as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.
I was bad, I had done bad things, I had hurt people, and the worst of it was, I didn’t want to stop. Blue.
What were any of us but a handful of weeds. Who was to say what our value was? What was the value of for Vietnam vets playing poker every afternoon in front of the Spanish market on Glendale boulevard, making their moves with a great deck missing a written and a five? Maybe the world depended on them, maybe they were the Fates, or the Graces.
We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water. I.
I imagined the lies the valedictorian was telling them right now. About the exciting future that lies ahead. I wish she’d tell them the truth: Half of you have gone as far in life as you’re ever going to. Look around. It’s all downhill from here.
It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.
She should have realized I was a bad luck person, she should never have thought I was someone to count on.
He just didn’t want to see how damaged she was. As long as she didn’t show him, that was all he asked for. A good show.
It made me hopefully, like someday my life would make sense too, if I could just hold all the pieces together at the same time.
The smell of the smoke always brought me back to my mother, to a rooftop under an untrustworthy moon. How beautiful she had been, how perfectly unhinged.
It felt so good to be high. I felt the lid of the pencil-gray sky lift and I could breathe, I didn’t dread the rest of the afternoon now.
Once the worst had happened to you, all the rest was just stuff and absence.
Of course I did, I was blank, anyone could fill me in. I waited to see who I would be, what they would create on my delicious vacancy.
Four was difficult and misunderstood, a genius before its time, it belonged to the planet of unexpected disaster.
I liked the shifting colors of groups on the courtyard, but could not distinguish one student from the next. They were too young and undamaged, sure of themselves. To them, pain was a country they had heard of, maybe watched on a show about on TV, but one whose stamp had not yet been made in their passports. Where could I find a place where my world connected to theirs?
He had bars on all the windows now. She stroked his new security door with the pads of her fingers like it was fur. “Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness.
I looked at my life and saw quite clearly that I was not surviving it in the turquoise house. I was letting my sails crust up with salt. I had to stop playing johnny johnny and concentrate on preparing for rain, preparing for rescue.
They’d retreated to the country with two passports only. From the outside it looked like death. People could pound the walls all they wanted, but they’d never find the door. Nobody could guess at the gardens inside.
That was Ingrid Magnussen. She made up rules and suddenly they were engraved on the Rosetta Stone, they’d been brought to the surface from a cave under the Dead Sea, they were inscribed on scrolls from the T’ang Dynasty.