What we liked most of all was each other. All three of us, the glorious fabric of the relationship, the family we made of ourselves—but we were losing the exhilaration we’d once felt, the wild emotional loops of our shared-identity roller coaster.
The audience Q and A begins, and someone asks about the relationship between kink and queerness.
Do not fear your moments of sorrow, your deep frustration, the force of your being. I have made you strong enough to want and not receive.
I’d tilt myself and roll to each side on the dirt, offering the bees new areas of my body.
Even at their best, in-laws were the occupational hazard of loving someone else.
Melinda’s violation of their agreement—to stay the same for each other, forever—was so profound that she split their shared sphere in two.
My mind drifted to the almost-lycanthropic being I’d imagined her becoming, half wolf, half researcher, neither coming back to me, dead or alive.
It was during my third year of teaching the saints at Holy Trinity that the burning began.
If there were any justice in the world, I would have been born a wolf. Instead, I’m a seventh grader.
Lori was in real, actual danger, but it was easy to convince herself she was not.
As the dentist works, her giant belly touches my arm and my head, and I think the baby kicks me.
The family in my novel is like this arowana. Born to hurt things. They are hunters, even when there is nothing left to hunt.
La-la land, she called it, that place her daughter went that she would never go.
My mother isn’t dead. I know this the way I know that squares are also rectangles, and that the sun is also a star.
On the anniversary of his death, I put a stem of jasmine in a glass vase on the windowsill. The flower’s fragrance a bridge between this world and the next.
They were lucky for the brilliant output of the world’s brilliant minds, for so many chances to consume it. Lucky to live in an age of plenty, of pleasure.
He never imagined himself holding a placard, waving a fist. But this, this he could do. People needed to be fed.
