In the mornings, the woman sees her husband off to work in her night dress, sometimes with curlers in her hair. After he leaves, she always lights a cigarette and stands with the glass-paned storm door cracked open. I can tell the inside of their house smells like knock-off Estée Lauder and menthol smoke.

My professor is French. You can tell by her voice, and because she just told us that she and her husband met through adultery, as if it was an app on your phone.

Emily was mine first.

Sarah has just been promoted at the publishing house, and I realize she thinks she is doing her job at this party

Smile in heavy make-up, feeling like a pill is stuck in your throat.

A snag with Monday is I have to neck all three of my Subtext in one go. Each under the tongue. The man who administers, Sven, can’t be arsed to say why but he’s a pure archcretin.

I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.

That’s why we are “in relationship,” to deliberately alienate each other’s unhappiness—to build an incredible shrine to unhappiness that would be seen for miles in a flatland, if such a shrine could be visible.

I spent the next couple hours grooming myself and getting drunk. I was sick all the time back then.

I blast the airhorn before the lump on the floor knows what’s going on.

Every winter, the Jersey Shore freezes into an old car in the driveway, tarped and bricked until May.

How they stabbed me and got away with it!

He came down my throat, I slurped it all up.

Everything tended to with love bears fruit they told me. 

That every aspect of her life could have an expensive accoutrement was highly erotic.

How much would you pay to have an honest conversation with yourself?

He turns up late to almost all of his final exams, answers whatever questions he feels like and defaces the rest of the paper.

I lie in bed a long time before sleep comes. I wonder if I love Natalie or if I’m just so bored and I’m turning fleeting, tiny moments into full scale cinematic affairs in my head.

I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.

She breathed deeply and saw an image of the naughtiest kids in the afterschool program laughing at her.

My neighbor let his Rottweiler roam without a leash again and I’m an inch away from planting razor blades inside my tomatoes.

At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society. 

He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.

Above the tree line, the sky has turned the color of a day-old bruise. The reception has begun to clear. Whichever uncle had parked his motorcycle in the driveway was now gone.  
 

Our dad knew about Surface-to-Air missiles. Our mother knew what we told her.