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... more

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

I wish I could be sharing a coke with you right now; you only drink water though, and I drink whatever I can find; we work like that, don’t we?

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

Over and over again, he said it, and I started to feel it, and it felt real. The care.

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.

Bill looked like a hundred people I’d taken rides from: flannel shirt, sunburned, open-air Jeep, someone resigned enough to take on a hitchhiker and think, if you pull a knife on me in the next mile, I can live with that.

even when I’m sure it’s polyester, and the silk is one more kiss you trail across my body and say,

"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.

and two... more

All my friends refer to my housemates as “the LCs,” short for the Lapsed Christians, because Bridget and Jeff met in Minnesota at some evangelist college where they started fucking and eventually got expelled. My friends find them fascinating.

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