Geek Love

by Katherine Dunn

Draped with a few dead rodents she could slip unsuspected into cucumber luncheons.

Her voice was a stretched tissue of sound that meant she was not going to cry, that she was deliberately squeezing back the more obvious forms of grief. It was harder to deal with than her crying.

The irony of my killing her righteously for doing what she considers righteous—and she, remember, never killed anyone—is hilarious to me. I must watch my drinking. I like it too much.

She was chipper, and she proved that “feeling good” about herself, as she called it, didn’t make her any less irritating than being pathetic. There was a difference, though. Where she had been wetly repellent she was now obnoxious.

You can’t imagine what it is to realize that there are people at large whose first reaction to the sight of your children is to reach for a gun.

We designate this victim as a ‘stand-up guy’ by the simple expedient of sitting down around him.”

I hated Mama for refusing to see enough to be miserable with me.

Like colors or a spring tree against that kind of blue sky that pulls your heart out through your eyes. Pretty things will swarm you like that, like your heart was a hive of electric bees.

The ragged straps of his coveralls rode his bare bony shoulders as though nobody loved him.