Q

by Christina Dalcher

if enough time passes, people can get used to anything.

We needed to move on from the one-size-fits-all mentality.

“change in a system doesn’t happen without change in the people who make up that system.

Evil or not, they won. They yelled and voted and screamed for stricter anti-immigration policies. They voted down No Child Left Behind and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Not that people didn’t want to give a leg up to the disadvantaged or the differently abled. They did. They just didn’t want them in the same classrooms with their own kids.

you can get rid of the old fish at the barrel’s bottom, but that just means there’s a fresh layer of rottenness waiting to be dug up and tossed out.

“You work hard, you study, you succeed, you get a job.”

The problem here is childishly simplistic: The jobs are disappearing and the people aren’t.

Diversity never made it past a slow, awkward shuffle.

So much love can only bring fantastic amounts of pain.

Somewhere in my daughter is a filter made out of steel. Or titanium. Or Kryptonite.

When I reach out and she falls into me, she weighs as much as a sigh.

when I thought of the money I could make teaching in one of the new silver schools, I leaped at it. No more struggling, no more pinching pennies to cover the electric bill. We’d fit into the world, and make the world fit us. We’d create our very own master class.

They say time is constant, steady, always moving at the same pace. But that’s a bald lie.

When humans find themselves in extreme situations, in personal trauma, a mechanism clicks on. A switch is thrown. Even the most introverted open themselves up and bare their souls.

It’s too easy to think of yourself as the one who stands up when everyone else sits down, but I wonder if I have it in me to be that selfless.

We simply sit and shift, like bits of stew in a pressure cooker.

What’s so fucking wrong about wanting to be wanted? In all the ways.

Children are resilient, I think. And that’s good in so many ways—they fall down, they dust themselves off, they get back up and do it all over again. But resilience brings a sort of callousness with it, an acceptance and tolerance that piggyback along.

her face opens into a broad smile that warms me like a summer sun.

Kansas is flat as a pancake. No, it’s flatter than that. It’s so flat, it might as well be concave.

Universities are like beehives,

There are bars on the windows. In my experience, bars serve one of two purposes. They either keep people out or they keep people in.

Maybe all mothers are semi-insane. Maybe that’s part of the deal we make when we decide to let our bodies become hosts, when we lie with our legs spread and our insides knotted in pain and push and push and push until we think we can’t push anymore, when we hold vigil during sleepless nights in rocking chairs and recliners, sweating over the slightest changes in a tiny creature’s appetite, body temperature, weight.