tom yum (●'◡'●)’s Reviews > The First Bad Man > Status Update

"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."

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.”

“This is how your body is shaped. See? Teeny tiny on top and not so tiny on the bottom.” Then she explained the illusion created by wearing dark colours on the bottom and bright colours on top. When I see other women with this colour combination I check to see if they’re a pear too and they always are—two pears can’t fool each other.

"The paper’s eyes were big and round, whereas mine disappear altogether if I smile, and my nose is more potatoey. That said, the spaces between my features are in perfect proportion to each other. So far no one has noticed this. Also my ears: darling little shells. I wear my hair tucked behind them and try to enter crowded rooms ear-first, walking sideways."

"The baby was swinging a crystal from a string. I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.
Dr. Broyard had Scandinavian features and wore tiny, judgmental glasses[...]"