On my thirty-eighth birthday, I had vivid daydreams of lying back in an ergonomic chair, with stretched out legs - my head inclined backwards just so. Magical vibrations, twelve adjustments and pockets in the side.
...
November 16, 2008. 2:35. Past the Korean wig shops and the bright, charming basement window full of massage oils and penis rings, on the way to the bus stop, Mrs. Norn makes her way through the buckets of cut flowers on the sidewalk outside the florist and orders flowers delivered to her on Friday, which will be her first full day in the grave.
...
My little boy is sleeping.
A week has passed and we have not yet spoken of the Pinewood Derby. Truly spoken about it. We have of course mentioned small inconsequential matters relating to the event but only in the peripheral way one talks about the condition of a sick person when he is close enough to overhear.
...
At six am the woman at the train station wears a black jersey vintage Anne Buck minidress with black lizard-skin appliqués on the shoulders. Her unbrushed hair is a cool champagne, chopped, with an eyelash-grazing fringe. Sunglass-wise, she's Ray Ban, hair wise she's Nico. Black Topshop ballet flats on her narrow feet, and a leopard-print cotton trench coat draped on one arm. A Hermes Kelly bag on the other.
...
My son lies on the sofa bed in the living room with a red and yellow sleeping bag pulled up to his chin. The same bag, it's true, that I used to cover Kathleen the night we slept in the tent in Vermont. Rain falls faintly on the tin roof above our heads.
...
Cheta passed over her buzz-around bumblebee-yellow jeep, the seawater-green Sebring convertible and the boring-black Mercedes that sat on blocks since her father left. It had to be the drab brown Taurus, Carmilita's shitmobile. Bummer. Carm had taught her to eat tacos, to paint her toes tomato-red when she was seven. Mother would scare up another beater for the woman. Otherwise, mama mia would break her porcelains scrubbing the saffron tiles, polishing the tea set, keeping up with the neighbor domain. Like, no way.
...
There is something about the clicking noise that is so sublimely soothing, that I feel okay, even in the deepest part of me. I know it sounds crazy, but it really is calming. Sometimes I play for hours at a time. I sit at the desk for so long that I don't even know what time it is or what day it is. The five of diamonds goes right on top of the six of clubs, nine over the ten, card by card the whole world falls into place, game after game, and ace after ace. I click deal and a new jack appears on the screen, a new king. Sometimes I pretend I am the queen of hearts, that each hand is my life being played out click by click.
...
Steve was sitting on the bench in the park and did not seem to notice anything around. All suicidal people are like this. Separation with his girlfriend felt like the end of the world. I was sitting beside him. He neither saw nor felt me.
...
She begged him so he took her back to the seashore, two hundred miles away. Back to her hometown where she had lived until she went away to school. Where her parents had lived for thirty years beyond that until their deaths.
...
The willing suspension of disbelief, a parakeet.
You cook then leave dishes for the reader.
I prevent having dishes to wash by not cooking.
I eat nuts and cheese and berries, but what if I did not eat?
...
Contracts made in the first week of a relationship are binding. Say he buys you flowers in an attempt at a grand gesture, this gift must continue, flowers ad infinitum, he's a hall of mirrors, bouquets in hands receding.
...
Beer Mystic Excerpt #11
I tramp across the Brooklyn Bridge because when I can ' t sleep I walk even though I know
that during construction defective wire was woven into the cables to cut costs. This is how
knowing gnaws away at necessity of faith. Tonight the cables [made of 14,000 miles of woven wire]
are vibrant, harp-like, trilling with the febrile moir é music of hum and fray,
stress and sway. A chill rattles the keys in my pocket. The East River looks brassy
and non-negotiable and protects Brooklyn from Manhattan or vice versa.
...
