Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

And she’d thought joyously, foolishly, that her son’s love for her was so powerful that he’d felt the need to create an entirely new word with which to express it.

And I don’t tell Saff the truth: that my body knows more than my brain does, too, that that’s why I starve it. Instead, I tell her a lie. I tell her that I can help her.

“She said she needed to know how it felt. How she’d made Astrid feel. She said she was afraid of becoming someone who couldn’t feel things.”

“It felt strong. Denying myself something I needed to feel strong. Not giving in when I was hungry felt strong.”

cabal

“Aren’t cabals for plotting government overthrow?”

spider so large you could distinguish the joints of its legs, poised at delicate angles.

They could turn to his right hand and ask the mollusk for a truth they did want to know.

“And what did the mouse tell them?” “A truth they didn’t want to know.”

Besides, his parents were wealthy enough that having a child in the arts was a status symbol, like a vacation home in a foreign country.

WHEN ELLIOT ARRIVED HOME, he found Val on the couch reading. Without a word, he lifted the screen from her hands, took down her pants, and hoisted her hips to the edge of the couch. He persisted over her laughing questions and moved the hands she laid on his head back down to her sides so that his mouth was the only point where he and she joined. He thought of the honey, how it brimmed above the curve of the spoon while still holding its droplet shape. Val didn’t taste like honey of course; she tasted briny and close. He worked at her tenderly, stopping to kiss the folds and scallops of her, tracing them with the tip of his tongue and nose. After she came, she looked down at him, her eyes not opaque anymore but transparent, glass.

Or was it that she had denied him this last inch of her? He

And it seemed to Pearl a type of violence, that much charm continuously wielded, a blade that severed you from your own good sense.