The Farm

by Joanne Ramos

Mrs. Carter, she is the type of mother who feels guilty. She likes to be with her baby; but she thinks she likes to be with her baby more than she likes to be with him. Do you understand? And this makes her guilty, because she believes love and time are the same.

Art is a leap of empathy!”

Mae likes this image of herself and seeks now to cultivate it: calmness in a maelstrom, sangfroid in a crisis.

Mae’s never understood why people—privileged people especially, like Reagan and Katie—insist that there’s something shameful in desiring money. No immigrant ever apologized for wanting a nicer life.

The only sound, anywhere, was her breathing. Her inhalations and exhalations, and the dark waters below. It was the loneliest sound in the world.

Everybody is a little racist.”

If you don’t notice, you can’t care, and you won’t do anything that matters,

Better to be plain and hardworking than beautiful and full of too many ideas.

Because in America you only have to know how to make money. Money buys everything else.

The problem is that she is too pretty. When you are too pretty, the other parts of you do not become strong.

Not every couple completes each other.

she’s the kind of person who likes humanity in the abstract but has little interest in actual people.

She feels suddenly a great disquiet, as if she herself is what is unreal, and not the actors going about their business onstage.

It is ludicrous. Entirely irrational. Possibly criminal. But it has the feel of the truth.

because what do we really control but how we react to life’s curveballs?

How could she have known that there is nothing worth seeing outside, only a dirty city under a dirty sky?

She loves him and hates him at the same time. Jane understands this; how you can hold both feelings in your heart, equally fierce.

There are people who move through the world like they own it, and the world seems to bend to their demands.