Megan Rowe > Recent Status Updates

I think brains might be machines that turn information into feelings and feelings back into decisions and I've discovered that my machine has been put together in a strange way and it translates life in a strange way but I have no way to fix this--I'm not a brain-machine fixer, I'm just a haver of a brain, like anyone, and none of us know how to fix ourselves, at least not entirely, not well enough.

When the adult community wouldn't provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender. When the adult community wouldn't provide a stable or rational environment the children could create for themselves a world that was functional and tender.

"I'm going to talk to you as though you can understand," he said. "Shyster to shyster, as it were. Those with no talent for swindling always suffer." He gestured outside. "You and I both know that no compassion can be expected from the Germans. Whether we live or die depends on how long they're in power. If they have enough time, they'll kill us all. If not, some can be saved."

"Is he dead?" I asked. But I could see that he wasn't. His head was jerking back and forth and his hands were clenching.
Boris squatted and pulled out a safety pin and a note that said LIVE AND LET LIVE and pinned it to the kid's shirt.
"Give me that honey," he said. Then he pulled me back onto the street.
"We're just going to leave him?" I asked. But we already had.

It was like that. They'd known, both of them, on the spot, that there was this fit, something just comfortable and congruous about their efforts together--or, it was easy enough to decide afterward, anyway, that they'd known.

But curses are not real. Earth is all magma and continental crust and ocean. Gravity and time. Isn't it? She closes her fist, walks into her room, and replaces the stone inside the model house. Slides the three roof panels back into place. Twists the chimney ninety degrees. Slips the house inside her pocket.

So, Toni looked pretty surprised when we were hanging out with the Astros and Dodgers playing in the background, and I admitted to Manny and Jasmine, "I fucked up." But Toni didn't look surprised like you could knock her over with a feather. She looked how a parent does when they notice their kid tying their shoes for the first time.

A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth.

A dangerously underweight corporal in threadbare fatigues comes for Werner on foot. Long fingers, a thatch of thinning hair beneath is cap. One of his boots has lost its lace, and its tongue lolls cannibalistically. He says, "You're little."

My car was cold, the glass fogged. I drove home with windows down. The sky was purple. Nate would call it aubergine. To Cody, it's probably violet. It all means the same when painted on a winter sky: snow was on the way.

Marie-Laure wakes and thinks she hears the shuffle of Papa's shoes, the clink of his key ring. Fourth floor fifth floor sixth. His fingers brush the doorknob. His body radiates a faint but palpable heat in the chair beside her. His little tools rasp across wood. He smells of glue and Gauloises bleues.
But it is only the house groaning. The sea throwing foam against rocks. Deceits of the mind.

Werner thinks of his childhood, the skeins of coal dust suspended in the air on winter mornings, settling on windowsills, in the children's ears, in their lungs, except down here in this hole, the white dust is the inverse, as if he is trapped in some deep mine that is the same but also the opposite of the one that killed his father.

The following day, the radio stations begin disappearing. The warders in the guards' station whack the side of their wireless and tilt it this way and that, but only static comes out of its speaker. As if each relay antenna were a candle flame and a pair of fingers came along and pinched it out.

The second gift is heavy, wrapped in paper and twine. Inside is a massive spiral-bound book. In Braille.
"They said it's for boys. Or very adventurous girls." She can hear him smiling.
She lies her fingertips across the embossed title page. Around. The. World. In. Eighty. Days. "Papa, it's too expensive."

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

Tithonus-- "And thee returning on thy silver wheels."

I feel my stomach drop out from under me at the thought, a fully formed person suddenly vanished, undigested emotions with nowhere to go.

Reading Dottie to Robby over cinnamon toast crunch cereal this morning. His favorite so far was "The Dodo Bird." He made me read it 4 times (4 times!).

But this was one of the pleasures of traveling: you were always allowed to marvel at the incongruities that, when they faced you in your everyday life, say, in the suburbs, you simply rolled right past, thinking, big deal, let's get moving.

"Let go," my dad said. When I looked at him I could see he knew what I was thinking, and in that instant I realized that my dad, and so my mom, knew who I really was.

This was, after all, what travel was for: to see that which so few others did and to carry the memory of that through life, to remember the elsewhere, the otherwise.

And, on the most important holy days, beg the sexton to let him ring the bells so that he could hang with all his weight on the great rope and feel himself borne up by it in its flight.

Forgive yourself the fires you didn't even try To put out in time. Forgive yourself the ghosts That follow you around like skinny shelter cats, And the sugar water you feed them And the little velvet box you place them in Before you get into bed each night so that they'll stay.

When we enter the "line," do we sink into a sonic chamber of echoes and murmurs, an intertext that, like a cathedral, whether in Canterbury or in Cleveland, occupies a metaphysical location always the same?

For me, the act of writing is all about getting rid of self-criticism, and at the same time I have an almost religious belief in literature. These two kingdoms are impossible to unite.

I wanted Boyd to comfort me. He had a talent for that. If you were insulted because some asshole at day care said your kid's shoes were unsuitable, if you splurged on a nice TV and then realized you'd overpaid, if you got fired from your job because you used up sick days and it wasn't your fault, Boyd could make it seem hilarious. He could remind you it was part of the ever-expanding joke of human trouble.

And look at that teenage girl across the aisle in the bus, combing her hair, checking it in a mirror, pulling some strands across her face to make it hang right. Girl, I wanted to say, he fucked up bad enough to get himself where he is, and you're still worried he won't like your hair?