Mirror Mirror On The Wall, Who’s The Biggest Asshole Of Them All
Steve Anwyll
I blast the airhorn before the lump on the floor knows what’s going on.
I blast the airhorn before the lump on the floor knows what’s going on.
Every winter, the Jersey Shore freezes into an old car in the driveway, tarped and bricked until May.
How they stabbed me and got away with it!
He came down my throat, I slurped it all up.
Everything tended to with love bears fruit they told me.
How much would you pay to have an honest conversation with yourself?
He turns up late to almost all of his final exams, answers whatever questions he feels like and defaces the rest of the paper.
I lie in bed a long time before sleep comes. I wonder if I love Natalie or if I’m just so bored and I’m turning fleeting, tiny moments into full scale cinematic affairs in my head.
I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.
She breathed deeply and saw an image of the naughtiest kids in the afterschool program laughing at her.
My neighbor let his Rottweiler roam without a leash again and I’m an inch away from planting razor blades inside my tomatoes.
At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society.
He had a little radio, and on the mornings it snowed, he listened over and over to the lists of school closings until he knew them by heart: Kellerville area, Longstead area, Mount Holly area, all the outlying place-names, all the Our Lady of’s. Sometimes there was only a two-hour delay, and he wondered what it must be like, to have the boon of two extra hours like that.
Above the tree line, the sky has turned the color of a day-old bruise. The reception has begun to clear. Whichever uncle had parked his motorcycle in the driveway was now gone.
Our dad knew about Surface-to-Air missiles. Our mother knew what we told her.
I’m trying to lose my ego before Coachella.
And sure, not all moths were so blindly abiding, but that these grand ideas remained a possibility was often enough to console or comfort the moth. You see, the moth, culturally, was keenly aware of toxic attachments—meaning, they were rigidly open to all possibilities in an effort not to favor one delusion over another.
Sure, he’d miss chewing certain types of wood, the smell of garbage disposal, the indescribable pleasure of being shaded by a tree or large shrub. He could wait until spring, he supposed, to die among the scent of lilacs, one last taste of sweet pansy, a final sting of bee balm.
I didn’t hurt him, except maybe his feelings.
Each day it paints the clearest possible picture of the gulch you’ve driven your life into.
He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.
The weather is hot. The air conditioning is broken. Everyone’s body is aching. “You’re old enough to know.” Our parents, he says, agree: it is time for us to understand openings, to recognize that we are not pinatas. We are not stuffed with sugary candies in tight plastic wrappers. Streamers and noisemakers will not burst forth from our chests. We should not go at one another with baseball bats. Openings are not occasions for blindfolds.
The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.
Is this new relationship self-sabotage in disguise, or is it the cure?
Garielle's longest, most peculiar, most particularized book. A sure-to-be collector's item. Not be be missed!