Madeline’s Reviews > Luster > Status Update

3/3 I too am still alive, and actually this is the more remarkable feat. Instead I let myself be awed by his middling command of the wine list.”

2/3 tells you it would be easier to be dead. So, sure, an older man is a wonder because he has paid thirty-eight years of Con Ed bills and suffered food poisoning and seen the climate reports and still not killed himself, but somehow, after being a woman for 23 years, after the ovarian torsion and student loans and newfangled Nazis in button downs,

1/3 “He is the most obvious thing that has ever happened to me, and all around the city it is happening to other silly, half-formed women excited by men who've simply met the prerequisite of living a little more life, a terribly unspecial thing that is just what happens when you keep on getting up and brushing your teeth and going to work and ignoring the whisper that comes to you at night and

1/2 “She puts her arms around me and says, I am so happy right now. I do my best to be cool about this contact, but it has never happened before, and I pat her awkwardly on the shoulder, terrified that a too-enthusiastic reciprocation will alert her to her error, like the way a white person might raise a jungle cat from birth and be pals for a time until the cat turns five and realizes it is, in fact, a carnivore.

“It is not so bad to be an incubator. Everything I eat and drink feels like it amounts to something. Oysters, choc-olate, mangos drenched in chili oil, all for a purpose and all ex-cused, an education for the palate I am building with the most acute iterations of sugar and salt. But conversely, it is terrible being an incubator. Everything I do feels like it should amount to something.”

“God is not for women. He is for the fruit. He makes you want and he makes you wicked, and while you sleep, he plants a seed in your womb that will be born just to die.”

“I think of all the gods I have made out of feeble men.”