The Button
Zoe Messinger
I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.
I wanted to be “that girl,” but my new high-waisted pants from the Marais were already unbuttoned once.
Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.
To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.
Violet and I sit in her bed a while and talk. She shows me how to unhook and snake a bra through a sleeve.
“When Zac started writing the poems, I didn’t think it would get to this.”
“Foresee this, I did not,” Yoda commiserated. But he knew what he had to do. He just didn’t know if he could do it.
Under what circumstances do we find ourselves here?
This was months ago. April, maybe May. The weather was foggy. So was my brain. I saw you again in the Cubism section. I was standing in front of “The Actor” by Picasso. The second I saw you, I smiled
"You won’t let me love you, so I am loving this plant,” he says.
People used to tell my father they looked alike, he and Bruce, and I suppose it was true.
Betty's son Jonah is convulsing in the kitchen and there are fifty ways he could die.
"He’s trying to tell you that he’s cool,” Jay said. “He’d probably buy us beer.”
I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t want to suffer. I love her. I love her very much.
When Robert was small, it seemed like he didn’t quite see people. It wasn’t that he disliked people; it was just that he was more interested in igniting, with matches, small patches of grass soaked in gasoline.
I think about her. A faint yellow light from the street falls on the floor.
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!