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Carrots,” she paused for effect, “give you the will to live.”
She blinked, her face exhausted yet vacated by a calm, empty look. “I am,” she said. “I’m the president of the United States. And I have made the stuffed cabbages for the secretary of defense.
As if the charity of the world had tipped, finally, to one side of the rusted scale. The kind of day where you can fill in your scars with Magic Marker and tell yourself you’re normal—and it might be true.
“And hey,” she pointed her pinkie at him, “she wrote poems too, you know, my little Lina. Better than Robert Frost, if you can believe it. What did he do anyway, look at trees and feel bad? That’s no way to live.”
He wanted to tell her that the body was just this stupid little shovel we use to dig through the hours only to end up surrounded by more empty space than we know what to do with.
“More like being crushed by two ballsacks filled with demon blood. You ever been crushed by a ballsack?”
Fake healthy. They cut up two stalks of romaine, toss it into a bowl of mayo covered in bacon bits, and call it ‘conscious crisps.’ Don’t that make you wanna punch a toddler?”
Some of our leaders are even lizards in disguise. I mean, how else do you explain Dick Cheney?
soccer mom Comic Sans.
“Okay, let me look for a bathroom,” Hai tells her in Vietnamese. Before he could take a step further, she grabs a lidded earthenware pot from a wall shelf, clearly an antique, and puts it on the floor. “Bà ngoại!” Sony squeals as Bà ngoại squats over the pot, the sound of dribbling filling the room, and faces the boys, her eyes shut with relief. Hai covers Sony’s mouth. As she finishes, a patter of footsteps approaches. “Hurry up.” “Get me that towel!” Bà ngoại says. Hai hands her an embroidered cloth hanging on a rocking chair. She cleans herself, tosses the rag in the pot, and closes the
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swallowed. “To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big or grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think being president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough. Look at my girl, all that talent and for what, just to drown in Bud Light?” Water dripped from her nose. “People don’t know what’s enough, Labas. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
BJ tapped him on the chest and winked. “We’re about to make Stone Cold Steve Austin look like Mr. Rogers.”
“My mind only pulls in certain things,” Sony went on. “Sometimes I want it to pull in something else. Like my counselor dates, or the names of people I keep forgetting, or how somebody is feeling about CNN or the Patriots, or Wayne’s windowsill garden he loves so much…my mom. Your mom. But those things don’t come over and choose me. They leave me out of it.” He zipped his coat up to his chin. “Sometimes I want to think about being good. But it doesn’t choose me. It just doesn’t. I’m no good at goodness.”
There’s a way an old Connecticut town feels when you pass through it at night. Hollowed out, blasted yet stilled into a potent aftermath, all of it touched by an inexplicable beauty, like the outside has suddenly become one huge living room. And you feel you can sit down underneath the sincere light of a streetlamp and no one would bother you, no one would tell you to leave, because they know you’re staying for a reason.
How boring, he thought, to be yet another boy wanting to rid himself of the hometown dust clinging to his clothes, setting out like a spark flung from his mother’s cigarette.
That a boy beside a boy could form an island called “okayness.”
“Because it’s like that when you’re fourteen,” he said. The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible. You can say things like I want to be a gay father with a wife and kids, or When I’m high enough I start to feel sorry for straight people, they always seem trapped on front lawns, or When I’m sixty-five, I’ll be happier than my dad.”
He put both hands on Sony’s shoulders. “Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart.
liggabit.”
