Books

"The sheets in the photographs match the sheets on the bed. The body looks good. The face isn't much. I smile. I'm one of them now, a blade in the guts of some future girl."

From Things to Make and Break, by May-Lan Tan

Language, as she deployed it, was neither a line cast nor a bullet fired. It was a catholic mechanism: the sharp twist of a pilot biscuit into the waifish body of a christ. A word, placed on her tongue, became flesh. One night it was almost morning, I could almost see her, every sentence a necklace she was pulling out of her mouth, tangled in smoke.

From Things to Make and Break, by May-Lan Tan

On the deepest level in my gut, I knew she was not coming. How could she come? It was ridiculous. Idealistic. Flighty. Fantasy. But she’d told me she’d gotten a driver, and she would leave the city around ten a.m. I had to take her at her word. Though I’d possibly be cooler, more authentic, if I didn’t scrub the toilet and change my books around so the obscure ones would show.

Chloe Caldwell, I’ll Tell You In Person

"I could speak to them all right, but at the point they stopped being strangers I always wished they'd be strangers again."

-Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

The first time she told her mother to fuck off, her mother was sitting on the dirty blue velvet couch, reading the newspaper. Polly walked into the living room, excited. Her mother didn’t look up. There was a bottle of beer, open, mostly full, sweating on the table next to her.
“Fuck you!” Polly said, clenching and unclenching her fists.
Her mother looked up, alarmed, but without missing a beat, she whacked Polly across the face with the newspaper.

—Paula Bomer, “Down the Alley” from Inside Madeleine