Incidents Around the House

by Josh Malerman

But one time when I asked her what would happen to me if I let her into my heart, she told me I would go where she comes from. We’d switch places, she said. I told her I didn’t want to be in the closet. She told me that’s not where she comes from.

The older I get, the more I think the barometer for intelligence is how kind you are. Because it’s not an easy thing to do, staying mindful, after all you go through in life.

That’s real cruelty. That’s world cruelty. Where it’s not just the idea that one person is cruel, it’s that they believe, and have reason to believe, the whole world feels the same.

So the goal, I think, is to stay kind for as long as you can, no matter what happens to you. No matter what you go through, no matter how many breaks you get and how many you don’t.

there’s one thing I could convey to you, one thing that would take root in you just like the need to eat and sleep, it would be this: try to stay kind as long as you can. For all of your life. Always be mindful of what others are enduring. And whatever you do, most of all, don’t allow someone else’s meanness, someone else’s cruelty, to get inside of you.

If you think about it, every time you’ve ever been scared in your life so far, you’ve also survived whatever you were scared of. Right? You’ve literally gotten through everything you thought you might not. Everything you thought you weren’t strong enough to get through…you got through it. Or else you wouldn’t be here to know you got through it. Right?

Grandma said they were going to “pay for it” tomorrow, but Evelyn said it’s the kind of money we’re supposed to spend while we’re still alive.

Daddo once told me that some words sound exactly like what they mean. I think “ritual” maybe is a word like that.

I fooled myself into thinking Douglas was the right man for me in the same way people tell themselves they like a job they have no love for.