Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.

“Hey buddy, are you alright?” 

The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm. 

“I’m going to be.” 

The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.

Echo pressed her index finger to the Facebook icon on her phone, opening up a chat with her recent ex, Morgan, who was still typing.

Pete wasn’t looking at me. He was half listening, half joking and trading cash with girls walking men in and out of private rooms.

“You thought about being a dancer?”

My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.

But I didn't feel sick anymore, was the thing. The sweating, capsizing sensation, the kaleidoscope of Muppets I saw square dancing behind my eyelids on that third night when it was legitimately bad, all that had been weeks ago and still everyone brought my mother food. 

“Louis has stopped taking his dose.”

Sarah lowered herself to her knees in front of the fridge, continuing to uselessly rearrange the sanguinium. 

“We think maybe you can spend some extra time with him, maybe get him to start taking it again,” Tim said. “You do great with Dotty.”

Hours later, when all these thoughts and feelings had been erased by his pressing occupations, he got a text from her.
“dont b mad”

“There are some things that just cannot be reconciled,” the duck quacked, as it waddled across the path.

The man was disturbed. There seemed to be no end to the rain's falling, but only he was

We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.

Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.

I confess my DIY rituals in high school, tiny fires fueled by crumpled notes and dried flowers from lost loves and later, gifts from my parents bought during the divorce. In the smoke, my hope conceived visions: sometimes revenge, always return. Nothing I witnessed was more than smoke

Why bother with the pretense of health or ambition, when the world was ending and there were still snacks, drinks, trysts with another unwashed neighbor?

Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

The guy on the podcast had cancer, he was dying –every day he was dying a little bit more – and he was reflecting on being a literary agent.

Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.

"Six fine fish in that dirty pond! They're gonna die there anyway!" he told me. "They're gonna suffocate on all that mud."

She said: in my home, I want to feel at home. I want to feel as though I am swaddled in blanket, as though the walls pump food right to my gut. I water the plants, all seven or eight, some dying. I feed the cat

The first time I met Courtney, she told me she loved my ballet flats. We were wearing the same $14.99 shoes. She hated her curly hair and middle name and Democrats.

His fullest attention. No one gets that. And here it is, steered onto me.

1. Driving east on I-94 from 8:41 to 8:55 I saw brief glimpses of beauty.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, turning to the man in the seat beside me. Though he didn’t appear to speak English, he intuited my rejection. Loneliness, like love, is an international language.

The top of Yoda’s house looked like it had been splattered with molded yogurt. There was an allure to it. Like, had he intended to paint it this odd assortment of colors, he would be proud of it.

In her dance, Chang’e waves her sleeves to disperse the surrounding mist.