You asked Harrison who sat opposite you, if Mexico was a strong team and all he said was they might upset Argentina. He said this in reference to their game against Saudi-Arabia, you no see wetin them play against those Arab men the other day? Your hope dashed. You became a piece of meat doused with anxiety.

I have known / a hunger I would undo / my own good birth to sate
 

Between long sucks of her Newport, Jessalyn told me she was still so angry at her best friend for missing her wedding that she’d mailed her a box of crickets.

Crickets? I said.

Dead crickets.

What interested me about those stories didn’t really matter to you anyway.

Rebecca K. Reilly’s debut novel Greta & Valdin was a bestseller in her home country of New Zealand in 2021, and today it’s being released in the US and the UK. Pitched as Schitt’s Creek meets

You can tell everything about what a man will be like in bed by how he writes.  He had rhythm.

There is an attitude in the liberated fetal detachment

Perhaps God has entered the chat.

My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.

Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad.

Pontypridd

When I was born, they thought I was dead. My grandmother, who could neither read nor write, plunged me into a tub of cold water. I got started after that.

My father was a coal miner

My sister is more of a person than I am. She works at a bookshop and wears visually interesting outfits, ties up her blonde ringlets in a tall bun and ambles around our town in clogs. We hear her

A tired black horse lies down in a field, and doesn’t get up again.

MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002

I also have a white t-shirt I like a lot that says JOHN PRINE IS PRETTY GOOD, but I don't actually wear it because it comes down to my knees.

If the Internet doesn't drain all the money soon I will kool myself )for real 

It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.

And now I am left wondering how The End of the Story might have been different, what more we might have found out, had ‘Vincent’ not been a presence in that flowered armchair, had Lydia not been conscious of him invoking rules: there shouldn’t be any intimate scenes.

I am mauled by the gladness of it all.

Your Uber arrives and now you remember you’re not wearing any underwear.

I have a question for you. How did you bear it? That creeping loneliness, the way it whispers in the darkness. Sometimes, lying there at night after my own domestic and industrious day, I wonder how much longer I can bear it. Do you know what I mean?

I lie into the stone wall above the spa and flip open my copy of Less Than Zero to the corner I folded on 69. A passage on Christmas in Palm Springs.

“Girls like porn too,” she said. “Don’t be sexist.”

I go into parties wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt that says Bonjour on the front and Au
Revoir on the back, eating candy cigarettes.

That comment got 55 upvotes. I downvoted it. I don’t have friends anymore

I found a wallet today that contained $200, some credit cards, and some family pictures—my family now.