Mislaid

by Nell Zink

The campus was a complete universe. You never had to leave.

But the girls stayed cool and distant, even through “Marriage.”

Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.

As they fantasized (a primary investigative tool of law enforcement) freely and at length about her motives, alone or over drinks with friends, the sheriff and his deputies consistently came to feel that getting her son away from Lee ought to have been her first priority.

When two females vanish from a patriarchy, both of them attached to a homosexual, the ripples can be truly minimal.

“Never call them ‘nigger’ back. It’s a bad word. Just grab on tight to their shirt and hit their nose hard. Then let go and run away fast. Never hit anybody bigger than you, or anybody retarded. Only first graders.”

Meg felt more strongly than usual that many thoughts life had taught her to articulate were not her own, while many of her thoughts went unexpressed for lack of a suitable audience.

whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered.

Once you’ve lied to your child for years, it gets hard to find reasons to tell the truth.

On his own back porch he was always the same. Self-stalemated, dangling in the wind, exhausted.

He had positioned himself all his life as a rebel against a hegemonic order no one was interested in questioning anymore. It had lost its power to crush and all its clumsy weapons that inspired active fear. Its dominance was equal, but separate. Its monopoly was over, by design, because it had finally figured out that if you put the oppressed in charge of their own destinies they will trouble you no longer.

As a writer, she was struggling. As an accomplice to the wholesale drug trade, she was setting new benchmarks for excellence in felony crime.

As a speller he was adrift in a no-man’s-land between phonetic and dyslexic.

Gradually her fear faded to the existential angst that incessantly haunts all mankind in modernity.

The angst was: That you only live once. That you shouldn’t waste your youth.

It was the worry about not making the most of herself. The thing that troubles nearly all of us, nearly every day.

“My task is to discover and respond to community needs,” Byrdie replied, seeming to presume that he would never have needs of his own.

The South was built on the cheap labor of neighbors. No immigration, no out-migration, no upward mobility, no downward mobility. Land rich, dirt poor, don’t matter.

feigning modesty wet-sari style

mean, I’m glad I grew up black, because it’s cooler,