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

Suzanne saluted as she took off her shoes, I guess meaning it was fascist of me to insist on this.

“But they didn’t have them in sizes for babies,” Suzanne said.
“They were one size fits all. We thought maybe if he had a very large head . . . an adult-sized head . . .”

"These exotic revelations bubbled up involuntarily and I began to understand that the sleeplessness and vigilance and constant feedings were a form of brainwashing, a process by which my old self was being molded, slowly but with a steady force, into a new shape: a mother. It hurt. I tried to be conscious while it happened, like watching my own surgery. I hoped to retain a tiny corner of the old me [...]"

"I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?"

I was wondering if my life [...] could exist outside of the hospital. Or was the hospital its container? Was I like honey thinking it’s a small bear, not realising the bear is just the shape of its bottle?

"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."

"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."