Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance

by Alison Espach

because that was the fun of being sisters. Sometimes, you got to be younger than you were, and I got to be older.

“Man’s attempt to be civilized,” Mr. Klein had said, “has produced more massacres, holocausts, and genocides than any barbarians ever did.”

I hated how this happened, how certain audiences could turn something wonderful into something humiliating. How they can make you look at someone and suddenly, for no reason, hate them.

I was thinking that there was nothing better in this world than to discover someone who was weird in exactly the same way I was weird. To be weird and then loved for it.

I like knowing that my problems exist within a large and respected tradition of problems. That ever since the beginning of civilization, humans have been very upset.