After Dad died, I couldn’t turn to Mom for comfort, because she was sadder than me, and I couldn’t turn to my brother either, because he cried a river listening to Dad’s favorite songs, and my sister was in deep grief too, because she had never lost a thing before, not a wallet, not her phone, not even her keys, she had no fucking idea what loss is all about, and it came as a huge shock to her, that despite all efforts, loss happens.

1. She’s nearing thirty and her fertility is not going to improve, so it has to be now, if ever. 

And talks. And talks. It’s my fault for listening. ‘So, now I’m toying with a box of matches,’ she says, toying with a box of matches. I scribble in the notepad—hmmm. My clinical observation.

My boss, Scott, is reversing into an ape like the other managers in our department.

“Don’t be silly,” he says when I point out that his chin has glitters of gray hair, “It’s my daughter’s gel pens, she likes to draw.”

Picked up a guy on County State-Aid Highway 12 who had put his minivan in the ditch. I am not in the business of asking questions—these things happen.

Louisa, my coworker, keeps telling me about this studio where you decorate dishes before standing on the rooftop to fling them at the ground—she says it’s therapeutic.

I was at the mall food court eating a box of sweet potatoes that looked like chicken wings. I bit into one and it was a plantain.

It’s not the end of the world, you said, and I wouldn’t look at you. Kept my eyes on the murky brown stain above my head.

PRACTICAL INFORMATION
Hours: Continuous. You have always been inside.
Admission: Paid at birth. Non-refundable.

Her wrist tattoo rears back and pecks at night. Each “D” cracks, turns to wings, the “A” a beak. The “Y” becomes talons, bad as a knife.

And after she starts the lying, every subsequent lie becomes easier, rattling inside her mouth, then shooting out, like she’s spitting watermelon seeds. 

Just off the road to Interior, South Dakota, Riley is trying to sightsee in the Badlands with his girlfriend Stephanie, her son Clint.

The first hotel I ever got kicked out of was a Holiday Inn off I-90 in South Dakota, a four-story cube of beige, surrounded by nothing but truck stops and this one defunct waterpark with a partly melted-off T-Rex out front.

My whole family is with me in the kitchen. Someone has found a hurt animal smashed up by a hit-and-run on the dirt road running by the house.

The woman scooping our artisanal gelato is glaring at me like I’ve killed her sweet little Pomeranian in front of her when all I said was, “Could I get two cones? One pistachio and one chocolate hazelnut? Thanks.” 

Wesley enjoys classic orange soda, sleeping on the job and anything that could reasonably be termed artisan art. 

I drag myself around the Museum of What Was Left Behind because rain is trying to drown me outside. My mother late again to pick me up, this time from bead stringing next door. I’m working on my Girl Scout jewelry badge, even though I’m still a Brownie. 

In 1999, a romance novel cover model soared toward the Sun, sparking a debate over his stunt: was it free publicity or downright heroic? Some say when Fabio visited the amusement park, folly was the destined outcome.

The battered hearts ran away. They left their bodies behind, and their minds too.

I’m sorry for setting fires in our backyard after Dad left, for blowing up dead animals on doorsteps with firecrackers, for hurling rocks in the dark at the clapboard siding of every house on the street but ours, for skipping Mass on Sunday mornings to smoke weed in the woods with Kenny—

I consented to rolling all the way down the mountainside if pushed off the first precipice because it is only a well-founded reaction to the impulse.