Status Updates From The First Bad Man

“I’m the lactation consultant for this hospital and for Cedars-Sinai. I can get milk out of a fly.” [...] Mary attached the bottles to the cones and turned on the ancient machine. Shoop-pa, shoop-pa, shoop-pa. [...]
“Just like a cow. Ever been on a farm? No different from a cow. You hold these now.” Clee held the cups against her own chest.

"I followed the doctor across the room. I yearned for a lawyer and the right to make a phone call. But those rights were for arrested people. We got nothing. Whatever he told me would be the new reality and we’d just have to accept it."

"Soft was the wrong word. Satiny? Supple? A new word, I would come up with it right now—which letters would I use? S, for sure. Maybe an O. Was this how words were made? How would I announce the word? Who would I contact about that?"

"After a long time, ten or fifteen minutes, the kissing slowed. There were a series of closing kisses, goodbye kisses, kisses placed like lids on boxes—then the lid would pop off and need to be replaced. There, this is the final kiss—no, this is the final kiss. This one is, it really is. And now I’m just kissing that kiss good night."

"A net of cables and tubes was woven between him and many loud, beeping machines. There was hardly enough baby to accommodate all the things that had to go into him. [...] A bag of blood was rushed in; it was from San Diego. I’d been to the zoo there once. I imagined the blood being pulled out of a muscled zebra."

"The baby was so fair it was almost blue. Who that we know is blue? [...] But this question was just a funny costume, a silly clown nose on the real thought I was having. [...]
“Pea soup. We learned that in class. It means something bad. Call 911.” [...]
Suddenly there was a feathery sound like giant wet wings unfurling—it was Clee’s body unsticking from the plastic garbage bags."

no one can write an absolutely unhinged, fucked up woman with the worst kind of neurosis like miranda july. i always feel less crazy whenever i read her shit.

"Right as I pushed my hand through the flaps I realised, with horror, what it was. Rick’s snails. One hundred of them, all with their butts high in the air. They crawled upon broken pieces of each other, watery yellow guts smeared on brown shells. The inside of the box was thickly encrusted with layers of snails moving over each other, hundreds of blindly reaching antennae, and the smell—a rotten tang."

Weird!

I put my bank account into the negatives to buy this because I trust her

She nodded by slowly shutting her eyes and opening them again. I held the candle nervously, like hot potato.

“My parents?”

“Why your parents?”

“I don’t know. I just thought because this was therapy that might be the right answer.”