All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

by Bryn Greenwood

It felt like two dogs were playing tug-of-war with my heart.

If I couldn’t be any better to her than that, I didn’t have any business thinking I was sticking around for her.

lip, that also made her consider him a possible solution to one night of loneliness.

He squeezed me tight, almost as tight as I needed. Tight enough to let me know he wasn’t too afraid of Liam. Tight enough to tell me I was important to him. A little tighter and I would know I was more important than anything else. That was what I wanted.

Looking at the stars was like opening a familiar book.

Kellen’s slow game was different, like getting a wild rabbit to take a piece of carrot from my hand.

Then Wavy came. Wavy, with her eyes that weren’t any particular color except dark.

I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

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.

I thought it meant something that he was in love with me, but it only means something if you love the other person.

Renee liked to take quizzes out of women’s magazines. They were silly, but good for the same thing knitting was good for. 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. Lying on our beds on Sunday nights, Renee read the quizzes out loud, and I wrote down our answers.

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.

The crying kept getting louder and louder, until it was hard to listen to. 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.

That meant it wasn’t my wedding ring. When I pressed it to my mouth it was just a rock. The difference between a meteor falling through the atmosphere and a meteorite lying in the dirt.