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 broke everything that made me happy,”

All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

himself. 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.

God also didn’t want you to “pollute yourself.” Touching yourself for pleasure wasn’t what God designed your temple for, according to Charlotte. Either God was stupid or Charlotte was confused, because my temple was clearly designed for that.

The quizzes helped Renee empty her heart, and she filled it so quickly with the wrong things, it was no wonder she needed to empty it.

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.

All I’d ever thought about was how much I wanted him. Needed him.

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.

I was moving forward into space, but I would never come home again.

“Nothing left to be afraid of,” she’d said. Even if that wasn’t true, I wanted to live like it was.