Feel No Ways
Sara McGrath
Looking back, the efforts we made were desperate. We took walks. In bed, he fed me grapes; chilled, out of the refrigerator. We took weekends off work, spending money in small towns where there was
Looking back, the efforts we made were desperate. We took walks. In bed, he fed me grapes; chilled, out of the refrigerator. We took weekends off work, spending money in small towns where there was
My perverse compassion had destroyed all traces of a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
Do you remember everything I said last night? she asked.
You mean do I remember you crying and saying you loved me?
She needs a quick blowout, so I comb and press her golden hair until is a sheer curtain fluttering around a face thrown open to love.
“I love watching you get dressed.”
“More than you love watching me undress?”
When I am not exercising or performing space walks or cleaning or developing vehicle software, I watch the sun rise 16 times a day.
Standing in the kitchen the other day, out of nowhere I became disoriented and unsure of where I stood.
This guy’s old school, Roselli says to me over the phone, real old school. How old school can you be, I’m thinking, in a sport that’s already run its course in just a few years.
Everyone picks the chairs up and puts them in a circle. Then they turn the music on and you start to walk along the perimeter.
My family’s eponymous foundation is a donor to Columbia University, in whose MFA program in Creative Writing I was enrolled, but due to some substance abuse problems last semester, I had to drop out . . .
Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.
Calvin felt calm.
He thought about God.
I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.
Ted had started the holidays in Aspen. Well, in the jail in Aspen, awaiting trial for a murder he’d committed in Snowmass.
In the dark we weren’t afraid to show our ugly selves. We admitted we loathed giving up our seats to old people and the pregnant. Don’t you just hate reading? We both said at the same time.
We left after midnight. We entered the forest, dark and green all around us, hundreds of miles deep. Woven together in the little cocoon of our car, our world was as large as the headlight beams in the dark forest.
For four days in 1997 I was a beam of light. Fuck off if you don’t believe me: I lit shit up. Daniel Ladinsky says Hafiz says, “The oil in the lamp the sun burns come from forests you once were, from rich deposits you left [behind],” but he was probably speaking metaphorically.
They aren’t the most attractive boys at school—not smarter or more stylish and certainly no more articulate. Their appeal is a mystery to anyone who isn’t under their spell.
The problem was I’d forgotten about the change in altitude. The grief counselor had suggested a getaway, so I fled the Alleghenies for the Rockies and the guest bedroom of my best college friend on a quiet block in Denver.
I believe it now—I’d be a fool not to—but that doesn’t mean I agree with it.
It was a franchise, the Prez thing, but one as secret as the mob.
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!