What she did not tell him balanced neatly with what she did.
A speck on the slender child grows into a gross deformity in the adult, inescapable, ragged at the edges.
Somehow, despite her politics and smarts, she had become a wife, and wives, as we all know, are invisible. The midnight elves of marriage. The house in the country, the apartment in the city, the taxes, the dog, all were her concern: he had no idea what she did with her time. It would have been compounded with children; thank goodness for childlessness, then.
The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.
He stepped closer to her and put his head in the crook of her neck and breathed his inadequacy out there, breathed in her love and the grease of her travels and knew he had been lucky, and that he had escaped the hungry dark once more.
The forest was not dark, because darkness has nothing to do with the forest – the forest is made of life, of light – but the trees moved with wind and subtle creatures.
She had to believe of herself that the better story was the true one, even if the worse was insistent.
So you win. No matter what, you win. It all works out for you in the end. Always. Someone or something’s looking out for you. It’s maddening.
Three glasses into a bottle of bourbon; it was past four, who cared? He had nowhere to be; he had nothing to do; he was deeply depressed, fracking depressed, deep-shale shattered.
We’re lonely down here,” he said. “It’s true. But we’re not alone.
The balls it took to proclaim a creative profession, the narcissism.
There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
She was so tired of the old way of telling stories, all those too-worn narrative paths, the familiar plot thickets, the fat social novels. She needed something messier, something sharper, something like a bomb going off.
What remained unsaid was almost too heavy to bear.
One by one, they guessed aloud about what Lotto had meant by this sculpture: nautilus, fiddlehead, galaxy. Thread running off its spindle. Forces of nature, perfect in beauty, perfectly ephemeral, they guessed. He was too shy to say time. He’d woken with a dry tongue and the urge to make the abstract concrete, to build his new understanding: that this was the way that time was, a spiral.
This, for eternity. He closed his eyes and wished. Her eyelashes on his cheek, her thighs on his waist, the first consummation of this terrifying thing they’d done. Marriage meant forever.
My husband is an almost entirely good person, and I say this as someone who believes that our better angels are matched by our bitterest devils, and there’s a constant battle happening inside all of us: a giant cockfight.
She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.
She misses believing in God.
Horrible to think that inside a human being there could be a human being. A separate brain thinking its separate thoughts.