Pretty Things

by Janelle Brown

We came from such disparity already that all we could do was draw closer. We were kids, we didn’t know any better.

Maybe first love is merely the inevitable emotional fallout of finding the first person who seems to give an honest shit about you.

On social media it’s all or nothing: lavish praise or appalled outrage; sycophants or trolls. Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.

depressed.” I study the somnambulant cant of Vanessa’s walk.

The woman finds herself in the mansion’s front parlor, where disapproving dead plutocrats peer down from their portraits, then she cuts through the drawing room and into the office.