When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.
Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?
When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.
Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?
The mushrooms I bought yesterday are moldy; the lines around my mouth have deepened. Tomorrow I am a mother for the first time.
Previously on...
Part 6 || Part 5 || Part 4 || Part 3 || Part 2 || Part 1 || Prologue
I Googled things that bond people. Google said trauma.
We’ve sat in pot smoke-filled basements, watching boys play video games, and I’ve sipped wine with my parents on special occasions, but neither of us have been to an actual party before.
Ken pounded out three novelty songs on his busted up acoustic guitar, looking like a knock-off Daniel Johnston.
To try to allay his doubt, or figure out of it’s real, [Li] mentally consults his in-progress novel, as if it were a friend. He intuits, in an intuition described by the line you quoted, that his doubt is wrong, is habitual and self-sabotalogical.
If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost.
Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.
