The Wallcreeper

by Nell Zink

It should be about getting through difficult stuff together. Difficult stuff the world throws at you, not difficult stuff you do to each other.

(why exactly twenty-somethings are considered so vital to protest movements, I never figured out, seeing as how they never vote and have no money)

exquisite pamphlets on visibly recycled paper (not the white kind),

The only thing they think laymen are good for is to supply emotional arguments that might make somebody put up with nature. But they know it won’t work. Because if you have a plant you don’t like the looks of on your lawn, or a bug that looks weird, you’re going to kill it, unless you’re a total sap. So all the nature lovers get this training and these jobs and make out like they’re master technicians of the ecosphere, but they’re just saps.

Because nobody knows how the ecosphere works. It just wants to be left alone. Life is what happens when you leave it alone.

She was young the way an actual young person is young. Not like weary, defeated Stephen and me.

Space, as any Kantian can tell you, is not forever. A struggling lover can demand his space and then want to see you again in two minutes.

“Having a free press doesn’t mean anyone cares,” he said. “My central insight of the past twenty years.”

I caught the bus from the airport with a young woman whose hair was lacquered into a ponytail as hard and shiny as a shrimp.

If a species can’t show itself without being shot at, it’s comforting to think it’s timid. If no nests have been seen for the past ten years, it’s nice to know the species requires perfect isolation to breed. Without the tips of icebergs, humankind would already be very lonely.

I’d like to be able to say we invented riparian porn rather than merely satirizing it, but they say if you can think of it, there’s pornography about it, so we can’t have been the first.

Albania is the West Virginia of Europe. Single mothers there dress and live as men.

Birds are braver than the other animals, because they have an ace up their sleeve: flight.

At the funeral, I finally met Stephen’s mother. She looked at me with a hatred I’d only ever seen before on a caracal in the zoo.

I was raised on art and literature, the opiates of the intellectually underprivileged”

I had been treating myself as resources to be mined. Now I know I am the soil where I grow.