Candy was different from the girls Robert knew. She didn’t care about vampires or makeup, but she knew about the Faces of Death VHS tapes you couldn’t find in the library or at Blockbuster. She was a vegetarian and loved looking at the potted plants at Home Depot, dreaming of the day she would have a yard.| n+1
The truth is, I want to fucking kill him. Because, not that long ago, I was a semi-together individual with some irons of my own in the fire, living in an apartment that had finally achieved the elegantly shabby je ne sais quoi one might hope for in a quaintly garret-like Brooklyn abode. And now I’m this wild-eyed person with scalloped rat barriers around her doors who watches her space heater on a baby monitor.| n+1Articles – n+1
We have no tradition, she said. What could we say to the dead except that we’re sorry for living? No, we confuse people too much already. How much more could they take? They hear “transsexual” and want us to prove it. They want weeping in front of mirrors. They want heartfelt confessions with parents on the couch. They will never take you seriously or consider you normal. They want hand-me-down emotions.| n+1Articles – n+1
I don’t care about anything else, I have them, when they wake up we can celebrate the prison break, the reunion, the successful hostage exchange, we can stop for breakfast, decide together what to do next.| n+1Articles – n+1
This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.| n+1Articles – n+1
He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.| n+1Articles – n+1
They could write a short story honoring the thwarted child by envisioning what its life might have become. The story had to be a minimum of ten pages double-spaced, with an honest attempt at showing rather than telling. Mike figured he’d give it a shot, as he’d prefer not to shell out more money to the government. Lord knew he already paid plenty in taxes.| n+1Articles – n+1
Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour. There was a narrow lane between their house and the one next door, and men passing by sometimes used the alley as a urinal.| n+1Articles – n+1
Out last night with Deja for a drink at a new bar near campus. The bar is nice but cannot decide who it is for. Drinks too sweet. After two my head was heavy. Hers too perhaps. I feel so grateful to have met you, she said. It’s when she says things like that.| n+1
I drink all the wine in the cellar before my friend flies into town. It’s just me and two housekeepers, four groundskeepers, and her mother’s best friend, who texts me from the next room whenever she’s leaving for yoga. Whenever I run into her, making coffee in the kitchen or by the pool, she’s stretching with a pained look on her face, her reading glasses twisted on Croakies around her neck.| n+1
When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.| n+1
I would see all her bright colors and form a very hazy idea of the whole. She seemed to be repainting the same picture over and over again, and every time I walked by my impression grew more distinct. I also began to feel uncontrollably jealous, half convinced her painting was one I had conceived of long ago and simply hadn’t had a chance to paint yet.| n+1
