Not Forever, But For Now

by Chuck Palahniuk

gorse

veldt

Richard Attenborough

lodestone

phrenology

Paper gives off such a stench, a quality that elevates the crudest page above the most eloquent of emails.

bedsit,

chilblains.”

garrote

goiter

skint

tureen

Otto rather fancies the idea of us two in a haunted castle with only a skeleton staff of servants. He says Christopher Robin and Winnie-the-Pooh did away with their parents.

duffer

peccary

vitrine.

secobarbital

phenobarbital

twee

sedge,

Because the instant one falls in love one must find a reason to eventually hate the beloved. And already Otto is hating Daisybelle for not being Pericles or Agamemnon, but being just another fragile twee creature filled with nothing but bones and blood.

yob,

lummox

scran,

anogenital

“It’s called texting,” says Otto. The screen offers any number of lovely places to touch. “Icons,” Otto calls them. Applications. With no more than the tap of a finger, one can order anything from take-out curry to a fiancé.

synchromesh,

Otto cranks the steering wheel to kill that always-moving part of himself that all young people need to kill. That reckless, restless you who you don’t want to be anymore by old age. Here Mummy would say, “Whom you don’t want to be.”

Otto says no one actually falls in love because you never meet the people driving the same speed as you.

milfoil

almondine.

ilk

History, Grandfather tells us, is always planned out well ahead of time.

mullioned

cenotaphs

rookeries

dovecotes

wi...

nuthatches

manse

ponces.

lintels.

gesso

bairn

phalanx

pyloric

Dioscorides

noisome

Our tutor, reinventing himself as the next Charles Darwin. The survival of the fetishist.

quoll