Don’t worry. Birdie closed her eyes. It’s fine.

Max excused himself to the restroom where he sat on the toilet, pants on to Google “how to break up with someone.”

You are such a hot cowboy and I feel so lucky that you’re with me in this, standing in these dark brain fields right now, I think to myself.

We knew, for example, that according to 23 and Me, White Water didn’t have even a trace of indigenous blood, not even Cherokee, not even if you went back four generations.

Wishfully thinking. Not really living up to those thoughts. I know it ain’t gonna happen and I know when this is over, I will go home, come back to my loneliness like clockwork.

Karen is tired.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s like that theory of the universe, a big bang followed by expansion until collapse, a big crunch, then a big bang again, ad infinitum, so that my curling, turtling pizzle will pop out again, pop in, pop out, poppet, an endless eon’s worth of self-fucking of a higher kind, a higher cruel.

He’d been by himself now for months except for game night with his colleagues and so he multiplied 13 by 47 in his head and divided it down until it was a trace behind the decimal point and then he asked her if she would like to meet him for a coffee downtown.

with beer bongs and messy boys who didn’t know how to do anything but shove shoulders down for head

Over the next few days, through a method of trial and error, I taught myself the basics of frontier survival.

You're glowing, she said. And why would I be glowing? It can't be the gutrot wine, or last week's fast food lunches. It can't be my Quasimodo limp, I smashed my toe on a fire hydrant trying to

When she used to swim at night her bones cut through water like perforating paper. It was always the same ritual, pants off first with a slight shimmy, arms up high overhead to get rid of the

It is a horrible thing to lose a friend, they said, and their saying this made him angry. What did they understand? They didn't understand a single thing.

My dad’s passed, my dad says. He’s driving to cremate and bury him. He tears one minute further from me. Two. His phone clatters on the dashboard. Horns and curses. He says BEEP fuck, if I could BEEP

The truth is i wanted to owe. 

but i couldn't say that, that kind of available, that i wanted a knife at my throat demanding all my money, in the bag now;

   A woman's shriek broke from the dining area, something in English trailing off into Italian.
            Keekah laughed heartily, "the mafia wife is calling."

I was informed that it was going to be some kind of horror and pornography mash-up. Lisa promised a murder.

I held out my fist, “Midwest love.”

She touched her knuckles to mine.

Like everyone born after 1991, I hate my job.

Can I sue ABC and Universal Televison for making the Hulk’s transformation overly sexual? I ask a lawyer on Main Street, but he requests that I leave, he has to get a lice treatment.

“What’s so horrible about being able to take all the emotions you don’t want to feel and just vomit them out of you, and then you’re clean, you’re done with them, you’re numbed out and high?”

“What’s so horrible about being able to get high on your own emptiness, on your strength and your willpower, on your superiority, on how you’re able to get by on so little, you may as well be made of air?”

Feels like the hour before closing at Chuck-E-Cheese.

The smile on her face huge and probably she knew then that she would marry him.

The bullies, they made him feel young, alive. He would never admit this to anyone, but he was fairly sure the other teachers, after a glass of wine or three, would concur.

Every breakfast, lunch and dinner were meticulously documented, each square captioned with the day’s creation: superfood pumpkin risotto, fatty bananas (bananas and butter), avocado tomato mash, yummy liver and beets, creamy spinach and pear, soupy rice porridge, breast milk oatmeal, silky tofu, creamy vegetable soup