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She walks into my life legs first, a long drink of water in the desert of my thirties. Her shoes are red; her eyes are green. She’s an Italian flag in occupied territory, and I fall for her like Paris. She mixes my metaphors like a martini and serves up my heart tartare. They all do. Every time. They have to. It’s that kind of story.
she takes a deep breath that makes her black dress shift just so.
Or she pricked her finger on a needle when she was sixteen and oh, glory, the things she’s done to keep on pricking.
Maybe it’s a simple one: the mirror said she wasn’t pretty anymore. Maybe it’s complicated, she got in over her head, and now she has three nights to cough up a name or an ugly little man is going to take her son.
It’s a vicious circle: the story gets told because the pattern repeats, and the pattern repeats because the story gets told.
become like dancing foam on the waves of his society: glittering, beautiful, tragic.
the man who wants your heart looming so big, so big over you, and you can give it to him, so bright and red and pure that it destroys him. Getting what you want has that effect, more often than you think.
hand out the kind of forgiveness that would wake the dead and sleeping.
her showing a little leg, me tipping my hat over my eyes, the dusty blinds, the broken sign beyond my window, blinking HOTEL into the inky night. It’s a pretty broad schtick, but it helps make my point: nothing here but us archetypes, sweetheart.
But that’s what fairy gold is: fake money, wisely invested. The morning was always going to come when you opened your 401k and it had all turned back to acorns and leaves.
Attachments beget stories, and I’m no protagonist.
not always dames, sometimes a paladin in an ice cream suit, and oh, if he doesn’t have that girl with the hair down to god-knows-where he’ll just die, or his wife is bored and unhappy and maybe she only ever liked him in the first place when he was a beast, or a wolf, or he’s just lost, and he can hear something like a bull calling for him from the deeps, and I fall for them because that’s the drill, but losing them is part of the denouement, and I know that better than anyone.
I tell them: look for sets of three, or seven. I tell them: there’s always a way to survive. I tell them: you can’t force fidelity. I tell them: don’t make bargains that involve major surgery.
tell them: you can share that bear with your sister.
I tell them: it’s not your fault. I tell them: mirrors lie. I tell them: you can wear those boots, if you want them. You can lift that sword. It was always your sword. I tell them: the apple has two sides. I tell them: just because he woke you up doesn’t mean you owe him anything. I tell them: his name is Rumplestiltskin.
he had black hair and copper skin and muscles like a commercial for the life you’re never going to have.
Poor girls gave him dandelions and rich girls gave him roses and he kissed them all like they were each of them specifically the key to the fulfillment of all his dreams. Maybe they were. Coyote didn’t play favorites. He had enough for everyone.
We all found our midterm papers under our pillows the next morning, finished and bibliographied, and damn if they weren’t the best essays we’d never written.
when I came it was like the long flying fall of a roller coaster, right into his arms.
take me in his mouth like he’d die if he didn’t.
They all knew about the others. I think they liked it that way—most of what mattered to Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley was Sarah Jane and Jessica and Ashley, and Coyote gave them permission to spend all their time together. Coyote gave us all permission, that was his thing. Cheat, fuck, drink, dance—just do it like you mean it!
She let me see her boob once in 9th grade and there wasn’t that much to see back then.
all wholesome white-blonde square-jaw aw-shucks muscle
We hated him like hate was something we’d invented in lab that week and had been saving up for something special.
Enemies are for grabbing by the ears and fucking them til they’re so sticky-knotted bound to you they call their wives by your name. Enemies are for absorbing, Jimmy.
Offering accepted. Just lay it up here on the altar and we’ll cut open that shiny belly and drink what she’s got for us. And what she had was golden and sweet and just as foamy as the sea.
I could hear Sarah Jane laughing in that way that says: just keep pouring and maybe I’ll show you something worth seeing.
it was a dumb thing to say, a boy thing, but when Coyote said it I felt it humming in my bones, everything we’d done before, over and over, and I couldn’t even remember a world before Coyote, only the one he made of us, down by the lake, under the wolf and the moon, his hands on my breasts like they were the saving of him.
You gotta ask me nice every time. You gotta make me think I’m special.
Fucking him felt like running in a long field, with no end in sight.
as soft as memory,
it made Coyote’s face look lean and angelic, so young and victorious and humble enough to make you think the choice was yours all along.
Coyote kissed him as hard as hurting, and Bobby kissed him back like he’d been waiting for it since he was born. Coyote got his hands under his shirt and oh, Coyote is good at that, getting under, getting around, and the boys smiled whenever their lips parted.
we were an island mysteriously sundered from the land of sequins and sweetheart necklines.
Whoever took the Homecoming crown had about a 60/40 chance of being up there in something they’d worn to their grandmother’s funeral.
She was already pregnant by then, and Jessica too, but I don’t think even they knew it yet. Bellies still flat as a plains state, cotton candy lipstick as perfect as a Rembrandt. Nobody got morning sickness, nobody’s feet swelled.
a girl like Sarah Jane just naturally grows girls like Jessica and Ashley to be her adjutants, her bridesmaids,
Whatever we might have chosen after hours of turning on the rack of the mall with nothing in our size or our color or modest enough for daddy or bare enough for us, well, it was hanging in our closets with a corsage on the hip.
something cut so low and slit so high it invited the world to love me best. I put it on and my head filled up with champagne like I’d already been sipping flutes for an hour, as if silk could make skin drunk.
When it slowed down he draped himself all over some lonesome thing who never thought she had a chance. The rest of us threw out our arms and danced with what our hands caught—Jessica
The music came from everywhere at once and the floor shook with our stomping. We were so strong that night, we were full of the year and and no one drank the punch because no one needed it, we just moved with Coyote
the slight weight of her, the chess queen, the queen of horses and jazz and grade point averages and pyramids and backflips, Juliet twice, thrice, a hundred times over.
You could see him re-sorting colleges in his head. It just about broke your heart. But we won 24-7, and Coyote led Bobby Zhao off the field with a sorry-buddy and a one-game-don’t-mean-a-thing, and before I drove off to the afterparty I saw them under the bleachers, foreheads pressed together, each clutching at the other’s skin like they wanted to climb inside, and they were beautiful like that, down there underneath the world, their helmets lying at their feet like old crowns.
We lived in an unbreakable bubble where nothing mattered.
But even then, they just got up and walked away, arm in arm and Coyote suddenly between them, oh-my-godding and let’s-do-that-againing.
The tribe was the tribe and the tribe was all of us and a tribe has to look after its young. The defensive line had a whole rotating system for bringing them chocolate milk in the middle of the night.
Rabbit and Coyote, they do each other favors, when they can.
Jimmy was trying to talk Ashley into making out with him in the back while the night wind whipped through their hair
no steroid needles blossoming up from his friendly palm like a bouquet of peonies.
Blood came up and in our mouths it turned to fire.
