Pigs in Heaven

by Barbara Kingsolver

No matter what kind of night you’re having, morning always wins.

Getting old is just a matter of getting easier to see through, until all your failing insides are in plain view and everyone’s business.

The backs of his hands remind him of paper burning in the fireplace, the moment the taut membrane goes slack into a thousand wrinkles, just before it withers to ash and air. He wonders if you get used to waking up old.

“When I was in my thirties I had these little square hips left over from being pregnant and I just hated it. I kept thinking, ‘All those years before, I had a perfect glamour-girl body, and I didn’t spend one minute appreciating it because I thought my nose had a bump in it.’ And now that I’m old, my shoulder hurts and I don’t sleep good and my knuckles swell up, and I think, ‘All those years in my thirties and forties I had a body where everything worked perfect. And I didn’t spend one minute appreciating it because I thought I had square hips.’”

Sympathizing over the behavior of men is the baking soda of women’s friendships, it seems, the thing that makes them bubble and rise.

It’s monstrous, what one person will do to another.

If men only knew, modesty makes women fall in love faster than all the cock-a-doodling in the world.