All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

by Bryn Greenwood

Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.

After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.

I could have told him there was no sense in rushing toward being dead. It would find you soon enough, and before it did there were pleasures to make your heart hurt less.

Renee ate in darting little bites and without chewing enough. The same way she filled her heart. Too quickly, and with too much talking and not enough feeling.

Those letters seemed so wonderfully tragic to me. Each one a message he would never get. A note in a bottle, bobbing on the ocean. Lost.

You can look up the word keening in the dictionary, but you don’t know what it means until you hear somebody having her heart ripped out.

No woman had ever looked at me the way she did, or touched me that way. Like she wanted me, like I was worth wanting.