The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

Little mirrors in which he can stare at himself even more.

“Sometimes it feels like you and I grew up in different houses.”

Being in the center of someone’s world like this was intoxicating.

“You’re right. I’m sorry. You can be mad at me as long as you need to be.” Like I need his permission.

the suffering is in the walls, in the floor, under the tables. it’s mixed into the paint. it smells like shit & fear.

How coy of Mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way, to demand that we guess what it was she was trying to say, like she was Sylvia fucking Plath.

Being weird is a luxury.

The desperation was in the negative space of everything she wrote.

He likes his birds with their wings broken,”

You know, stubborn, full of principles, but still delicate somehow.

we’re laughing like we share a set of lungs.

She wanted to take me back to the other mother. The one in the mental hospital who needed me brought to her, tied and quartered, like a sacrifice.

All the characters are me. That’s what the writing process is like. It’s schizophrenic. A person talking to himself. Robert might’ve had biographical features similar to Fred’s, but he wasn’t Fred. He was me. They were all me. So, yes, it’s deeply autobiographical in that sense.

And then I felt like there was an elevator shaft inside of me and I was falling down into it.

anybody not guided through life by their penis could see that something about her was not right.

That party picked a scab for me. Afterward, I lay awake with my menopausal insomnia, revisiting ancient slights.

“It’s hard sometimes,” she said, “to know where you end and where others begin.

After the mess in the gallery I feel hollowed out and now her words begin to fill me back up…

I was raised with the unconscious assumption that a white life was worth more than a black one.

But anger is a sap on your resources.

i want more cotton. i want to be taxidermied.

it’s terrible to always have to keep track of the edges of things as they slide away from you.

those thick alligator teardrops sliding down his cheeks as he suffocates me.

If you push in one direction, the pendulum will swing back with equal force, and here I am, standing in its path.

I keep thinking of Mom, of the pond inside her, of the broken dam and the sludge contaminating her, pouring out into her veins.

She literally chokes on your unhappiness.

“You kept me alive, well, you got your wish. Here I am.

She talked about having children. She said it was the point when her husband finally succeeded in invading her. He deformed her—not just her body, but something at the very center of her was stretched out and defiled.

a primal instinct to get her daughter away from herself and to safety, even if it meant breaking the girl’s heart.

He had been enough. Dennis had this idea that having children would replace the void left by my father’s death. But, of course, it just dug two more holes.

She said she did not want to get better. And, that if she wanted to be dead, she should have the right.

Decency is something you value more as you get older.

was the kind of woman gravity held down to earth with a stronger grip than most.

Modesty, restraint, self-respect—all that is garbage. It’s all ego. I don’t have time for it. Nobody does. Even little children who have more time than anyone else, even they know better. I

I crawl away from the mess I made. But the mess follows me because I am the mess.

Rather than being expansive, their love seemed to condense further and further inward—a circle, then a spiral, then a point, ratcheting the whole thing tighter and tighter, until the spring popped and Marianne went flying halfway across the universe.

It sounded like a firing squad and I could feel every letter lodging inside of me like a bullet.

music remembers it better.”