Siobhan

“It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.”
― Hanif Abdurraqib, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us

“Cars are not attached to anything. They are free to collide with other bodies whenever they want and wreck each other. This would not happen with my bumper car system. Cars would be attached to poles linked to an overarching mechanism, as they are in bumper cars. The worst that can happen in a bumper car is you make a strange face when you smash someone. A strange face that makes the other person think you are uglier than they thought and that maybe there are other ugly things they don’t know about you. But they forget in the next second when they are smashed by someone else. It doesn’t hurt, though, as much as real cars. It doesn’t hurt as much. No response. Human beings, she faxes the next day, develop counterintuitive connections to unexpected things, like inanimate objects, and things they thought they hated and wanted to die, like mice. No response.”
― Marie-Helene Bertino, Beautyland

“House Mom stapled loose hanging pieces of her clothing together and sealed it to her body with duct tape. She bound her hair into an indestructible rope hiding several rounds of ammunition. Her mouth was covered in scars where she had tried to wake sleeping pets and her skirts were dusted with strychnine and cobwebs. Rat traps held her stockings in place. She painted the undersides of her fingernails with Wite-Out and decorated the big purple hogweed scars up and down her arms with permanent marker. The soles of her shoes were crusted with bone and pygmy goat hairs and she licked at the drifts of dried cream in the palms of her hands. Her teeth dried into clear tiles clanking together around the house…”
― Grace Krilanovich, The Orange Eats Creeps

“At the underwhelming Thanksgiving table, my sister stood up and said she felt like a miscalculation. Worse, like the latest season of a sitcom that had petered out seasons ago—everyone knew the show was intolerable but watched anyway. If that wasn’t a metaphor for the news in America, she said, then what was.”
― Nora Lange, Us Fools