Harry forgot the rest of last night’s monologue, and just saw the crowd laughing. Applause was okay if it was accompanied by laughter, he just didn’t want to ask for claps. But laughs? In this world, people need to laugh.

I extended my time at the Hotel de Paris to fall into the bad habit of making love to the maid. And to recover and regain my strength, as my flu-ish bug was stubborn and I feared being on the road for too long with it.

When they ask you how your massage went, the first thing out of your mouth is a confession.

The idea behind this silencing was that new views might have an easier time taking hold if the old one weren't always barging into the fish schools and stamping on the new view's seeds before the seeds had latched. 

I think HH resented me for making him feel pedestrian, a cliché to himself; the male artist requesting a sort of self-censorship of the female artist on his behalf. (Image is everything and/but he wanted to control his; I had no right to it, to my version of it/him, in his male mind.)

I wondered if ingenue had any etymological roots to engineer in Russian, which sounds the same as ingenue in English, and also wondered if Mikhail would sleep next to me again if I asked him to.

Finally she told him she was feeling the same way, but that she didn’t have the words for it. Just the emoji of the face with only eyes and nothing else.

The more lucid among them felt an uplift in his presence; as if, as one patient put it, they were passengers on a luxury ocean liner bound for Europe.

Victor clenched a fist, ignoring the jab of pain from his broken finger, and raised it to Roy. “Brothers?” Roy glanced at him—his blue eyes, so aloof. So tired.

A hyper-masculine man with politics that are probably messy and a bio that says NO FATS NO FEMS but then why does he smile every time he calls me his baby girl? 

It was cold out.

He never did meet the kid.

He arrived in the city with an STD.

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