The Things She Did
Lauren Davis
Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.
Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.
About earlier, he had started to say —
— is that all you can think about, your duck?
When I was a freshman in college (many years ago, before the marriage and the children and the divorce and the loss of faith in God), I saw a man order eight McDoubles at a McDonald’s on campus and then proceed to eat them all.
While they wrote about the never-ending snowstorm in the first pages of their novel: outside of their apartment, snow began to fall.
~
It was four days into the snow, into writing their novel,
Old Seals Stadium is a shopping center now. It is a parking lot, a grocery store, a 24 Hour Fitness, a Ross Dress for Less, a Japanese dollar store. I get all my errands done at old Seals Stadium—all
I’m sitting on our carpet, legs crossed, beer in my crotch.
He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.
Take your pick. Me, they said I hung my off-speed stuff, lost track of the count, lacked mental toughness. I waved off too many signs.
The smell of grilled hot dogs is in the near distance.
After tonight, I’ll be demoted to my parents’ couch and a job at my uncle’s lumberyard.
It tasted like apple cider — apple and something astringent — cinnamon, a strong cinnamon, warming, brown sugar, and sprinkled throughout the loaf, unadvertised, was some kind of dried fruit with a mild taste — raisins, probably — partially rehydrated by the thawing process.
My mother and father are stuck in an optic deadlock, her looking at him like she is trying to solve a puzzle or remember the name of a particular film, him looking like he’s just deciphered answers to both.
I’m on a date with this dude, the guy’s gorgeous, and ripped, skin all sunburnt like a surfer with big white teeth and confident eyes. It’s all too sexy. But I’m on guard. I want to deny him but
You elaborate: Christmas just makes people emotional. "No," she says, raking at her hair with French-tipped nails. "I don't think so."
We’re riding the red line south when Xue suggests stopping in Chinatown to purchase thousand-year eggs. I picture her cracking open an enormous egg and a pterodactyl flying out. “They’re not really a
Also, every time they flew and he had that damn backpack on, he forgot that the space he occupied extended beyond his physical back. He whacked bystanders in the shoulders or the chest, and, at least once, the face.
Before that, the father had been away. It was a time that many fathers were away.
They bang their silverware and take turns slamming the toilet seat. They drag their garbage bins too late to the curb and leave them abused by stark weathers all week. Shaker knows there is an awkward progenitor situation.
I have coffee in my cup. I could toss the hot liquid on her and rush through the revolving door to my appointment, make her the slug.
Dixie leaned against the door, feeling the blood rush to one side before pounding it against the wood.
I’d scratch them by stretching out my fingers wide like cheerleading jazz hands and rub them up and down aggressively along our itchy wall to wall carpeted floors.
Being Jack’s a guy, he’s also tasked with the act of pulling my ass apart when needed so the Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Katz, a short petite woman of prissy demeanor who does her ass work in civilian clothes, even while wearing heels and a tiny purse strapped across her midsection, can insert her finger.
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
Garielle's longest, most peculiar, most particularized book. A sure-to-be collector's item. Not be be missed!