We want deeper insights into this woman who left us; we want her secrets; we want to know how she managed to do what she did—how she just one day vanished.
Whenever Murat visited our family farm during the Festival of the Great Slaughter he used to gather all the little boys and all the little girls in the pagoda overlooking the lake and declare that the place was our own nascent empire. It didn't have a name, or even an organizing principle, except, of course, Murat's inner vitality.
If you can arrange it, the best way to see Barcelona’s piece de resistance, Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathedral, is on a gurney, with someone to push you around inside while you lie on your back to study the heights of its sublime architecture – the tendrils of stone bridging space that any other cathedral architect would have left bare, austere and angular.
In private, we began with handcuffs, a shiny silver pair of handcuffs. I would take June’s small and delicate wrist in my hands and rub my thumbs across the softest, whitest skin there. June would exhale a soft moan at the touch of the steel, and then there would be the click of the mechanism engaging. Just like that, the cuff around my wrist, too, June and I would stay locked together no matter what tragedy befell us while at home...
Jules, my kid sister, is a million miles away in Bavaria nursing her father figure complex. She lives in snow with Otto, a widower who drives a vintage BMW to Lion’s Club meetings in Munich and Kempten. Jules is playing the cool Euro Babe but she’s really hiding out while trying to force a marriage.
Damn community-meeting suckin up smoke-time. My B-time. It all just a waste of time. Staff don’t know nothin, nohow. Look at Mr. Eric up there tellin us about scams. Watch out for the Magazine People. They out there, tryin to get you.
A girl watches her father through the screen door, a pack of Kools and short glass of whisky beside him. He faces the fields and the woods beyond him. Bobwhites call in the distance. He calls back to them, a high mournful whistle, cigarette smoke curling around his buzzcut, tight ears shining in the porch light.
My favorite story was when Jesus met that guy, and he said, You’re possessed, and the guy says, Yeah. Jesus isn’t like most people though, who would probably just leave, go home or cross the street or something. Get away from that guy! Jesus is okay with it.
Like me, Luke was eighteen. Like me, Luke played guitar. Like me, Luke wrote bad poetry. But unlike me, Luke was serving time in a correctional facility.
We fucked up Jason’s roommate, Jeremy. Truck was totally sick of that pussy’s mouth and he wrapped a bath towel over his face and punched him until the towel was red.