Land of Milk and Honey

by C Pam Zhang

The fur slipped off her shoulder and she shrugged it back again and again, so that it was impossible to discern nonchalance from a chill.

It’s just as hard to miss disaster as it is to bear witness. If you don’t see—you keep imagining.

Books accumulated: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, a dog-eared Italian edition of How to Win Friends and Influence People, Utopia, the reading list of a friendless teen boy that made me cringe.

If I were omnipotent, I said, sadly, I’d choose the world in which you can dance.

I would not serve bitter greens without the consolation of oil, so I began to keep back my less palatable feelings, awaiting a time when we would again sit languid over twelve courses, sharing as well the sweet, the fatty.

I only believe that the tongue, dumb beast, is not selfish in its instinctive cant toward pleasure.

We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don’t, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured.