Water. Like a blanket. Dark. Intoxicating. Cold.
She also understood there was a hole in her heart where her son should be, that she was a wicked, selfish woman for wishing him back.
You’re worried about what-ifs. Well, what if you stopped worrying?
Instead, I opened my eyes to find the thing in front of my face, wafting dead horse breath across my chin and up my nose, its mouth like a gaping maw; its eyes, two giant wormholes, twisting and bending with some apparitional substance that could hav...
Amber Rorman had told me too that our third grade teacher, Ms. Lizetti, was really a lesbian, which I thought was a disease until I asked Amber and Amber told me to ask her mother who told me to ask my mother, who said, “Lesbians are women who like...
You’re saying, “What the hell am I gonna do with her?” You’re saying, “Shit, did she take her pills?” You’re saying, “Once upon a time, I used to have a little girl.
It’s not like I planned it. I never woke up from some rosy dream and said, “Okay, world, today I’m gonna spaz.
Cuz I can count on one hand the men who’ve loved me, not in the Biblical sense—I don’t have enough digits for that—but who have truly loved me.
Her mother always told her, “If he hits you, then you leave,” but Jack had never hit her, not with his fists.
A woman brings so much more to the world than birth, for she can birth discovery, intelligence, invention, art, just as well as any man.
Once upon a long ago time I was a girl with hopeful halos in my eyes—not unlike you—not a typical beauty but beautiful nonetheless, as all young girls tend to be in their prime, even if they don’t tend to know it.
Using one’s beauty was the only way a smart girl could get by, at least that’s how it was back then, though even for a smart girl there were really only three professions. You could be a nurse or a teacher or a wife.
All I cared about that summer were suntans, beaches, boys and booze.
I think first of the children. What the hell am I supposed to tell them? Then I think about money, the house, all those things no widow will tell you ever crossed her mind.
She fantasized sometimes too about killing him a little: a little poison in his pudding, a little flick-flick-flick with a fillet knife at his throat.
Let’s call my mood melancholy; let’s call it remembrance. Or maybe let’s call it longing. Yes, let’s call it longing instead.
I hung a picture of him above my bed and learned by hand the internal workings of the female combustion engine.
Then the weeks rolled by in a sinister psych ward haze filled with white-coated orderlies and rocking whack-job patients torn straight from some old Jack Nicholson film, all anti-psychotic meds and padded lonely cells...
It wasn’t as if she’d thought it through or anything, how what a person wanted wasn’t always what they needed, and what a person needed might be the last thing they could ever want.
Don’t worry if you fall, sweet girl. Youth is made for bruises.
