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Capitalism! It was important to hate it, even though it was how you got money. Slowly, slowly, she found herself moving toward a position so philosophical even Jesus couldn’t have held it: that she must hate capitalism while at the same time loving film montages set in department stores.
Her stupidity panicked her, as well as the way her voice now sounded when she talked to people who hadn’t stopped being stupid yet.
It was a mistake to believe that other people were not living as deeply as you were. Besides, you were not even living that deeply.
Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate.
Inside the portal, a man who three years ago only ever posted things like “I’m a retard with butt aids” was now exhorting people to open their eyes to the power of socialism, which suddenly did seem the only way.
Of course it was always the people who called themselves enlightened who stole the most. Who picked up the slang the earliest. To show—what? That they were not like the others? That they knew what was worth stealing? They were the guiltiest too. But guilt was not worth anything.
It was in this place where we were on the verge of losing our bodies that bodies became the most important,
In childhood she had lain awake at night, on fire with a single question: how did French people know what they were saying? Yet when she finally asked her mother, she didn’t know either, which meant the problem must be inherited.
can’t learn? she googled late at night. can’t learn since losing my virginity?
In remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8:45–9:15 am
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
A picture of a new species of tree frog that had recently been discovered. Scientists speculated that the reason it had never before been seen was because, quote, “It is covered with warts and it wants to be left alone.” me me unbelievably me it me
A policeman bends down to the window, a policeman cuts the corner of a grassy verge, a policeman’s elbow, fixed around a neck, angles toward the camera. The sky jerks and scrabbles and then together we are on the pavement. The ruddy necks of the policemen, the stubble on the sides of policemen’s heads like grains of sand, the sunglasses of the policemen. The labored officious breathing of the policemen, which was never the breathing that stopped. The poreless plastic of nightsticks, the shields, the unstoppable jigsaw roll of tanks, the twitch of a muscle in her face where she used to smile at
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And often the fluid moment of the killing rippled in the portal, playing and replaying as if at some point it might change. And sometimes, as she saw the faces, her thumb would trace the line of the nose, the mouth, the eyes, as if to memorize someone who was not here anymore, who she knew about only because they had been disappeared.
White people, who had the political educations of potatoes—lumpy, unseasoned, and biased toward the Irish—were suddenly feeling compelled to speak out about injustice. This happened once every forty years on average, usually after a period when folk music became popular again. When folk music became popular again, it reminded people that they had ancestors, and then, after a considerable delay, that their ancestors had done bad things.
not feeling and not feeling all the things she would miss in the clear blue place.
The only thing that bound us together was this belief: that in every other country they eat unspeakable food; worship gods more see-through than glass; string together only the most meaningless syllables, like goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo-goo; are warlike but not noble; do not help the dead cross in the proper boats; do not send the correct incense up to the wide blue nostrils; crawl with whatever crawls; do not love their children, not the way we do; bare the most tempting body parts and cover the most mundane; cup their penises to protect them from supernatural forces; their poetry is piss; they
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CIA Confirms “Charlie Bit My Finger” Was on One of Osama bin Laden’s Computers Also a file called assss.jpeg.
A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. “So you were all calling each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each other binch, and that was even funnier?”
We wanted every last one of those bastards in jail! But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turned men to pigs.
Was it better to resist the new language where it stole, defanged, co-opted, consumed, or was it better to text thanksgiving titties be poppin to all your friends on the fourth Thursday of November, just as the humble bird of reason, which could never have represented us on our silver dollars, made its final unwilling sacrifice to our willingness to eat and be eaten by each other?
But worth remembering: the mind had been, in its childhood, a place of play. ■ ■ ■ It had also once been the place where you sounded like yourself. Gradually it had become the place where we sounded like each other, through some erosion of wind or water on a self not nearly as firm as stone.
The words Merry Christmas were now hurled like a challenge. They no longer meant newborn kings, or the dangling silver notes of a sleigh ride, or high childish hopes for snow. They meant “Do you accept Herr Santa as the all-powerful leader of the new white ethnostate?” ■
His two-year-old son, when asked whether he was a boy or a girl, invariably answered that he was a gun.
The future of intelligence must be about search, while the future of ignorance must be about the inability to evaluate information.
Sup hoor her little brother texted her. Why were we talking like this?!
Report: Man’s rectum fell out after he played phone games on the toilet for 30 minutes
Go not far enough, and find yourself guilty of complacency, complicity, a political slumping into the cushions of your time. Go too far, and find yourself saying that you didn’t care that a white child had been eaten by an alligator.
But how strange, she had thought, biting into a slice of bread-and-butter that tasted like sunshine in green fields, to live in a country where someone can say “the massacre” and you don’t have to ask which one.
with pigtails who came running down the aisle of a plane toward her once, and patted her all over her arms and legs as she passed, and it was like a rain of soft blue bruiseless plums.
She spat feebly into a little vial and sent it away and it came back that she was descended from the filles du roi, lower-class Frenchwomen who were shipped overseas to fuck Canada out of the beaverish wilderness.
But above all you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.
“Surely there must be exceptions,” her father ventured, the man who had spent his entire existence crusading against the exception. His white-hairy hand traveled to his belt, the way it always did when he was afraid. He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?
She wanted to stop people on the street and say, “Do you know about this? You should know about this. No one is talking about this!”
For she had spent the last two years letting things sink in, and now . . . guess what, bitch! Further absorption was no longer possible!
On the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that the dictator had finally gone too far. The next day, on the television in the NICU waiting room, a report that no he hadn’t, and in fact that it was no longer possible to go too far.
Was the baby American? If she was, was it because this was the dust that had raised her particles, was it because she was impossibly ambitious in a land of impossible ambition, or was it because this was the country that had so steadfastly refused to care for her?
“He’s not allowed to be an official service dog,” his trainer explained, “because the test is that you have to walk past a bucket of fried chicken and ignore it, and that was never gonna happen.” The baby squealed and called for more. The dog ate her fingers one by one—strange, how everything in the entire world wanted to do that to a baby.
One day they had the idea to hold a toy piano up to her bare feet, and at the first note she struck she uttered a sound of wild outrage—that they had been letting her kick against air and nothingness when she could have been kicking against music this whole time.
They did not, in the immediate aftermath, holding heaps of downy garments on their laps, wish for a cure. They wished for a better way to preserve a human smell. She and her mother and sister tore through the house like gray calligraphic hounds on a scent, and when they found a onesie or pair of socks or little tutu that was marked with that glowing signature they waved it in the air and said, “Here!” ■ ■ ■
“Animals are allowed?” she asked the funeral director. “Animals are allowed,” he said, and told her that once a horse had come, and was led up the aisle so he could nuzzle his owner for the last time, seeking among her face for sugar cubes, breathing the just-cut hay of her hair, still feeling in his body the hot red Yes that jumped to her smallest commands. But “Let me go” was now the order, and what the body said was No.
The dog was lowered to the baby in her casket and greeted her with visible recognition. Everyone wept at this, for she was still as a peach in a painting, and she wore an opaque mask of makeup and was no longer warm. Her eyes had been glued shut, and her hands no longer commanded the air, and her squeal had been returned to sound itself—so what was it about her that he recognized, what was it about her that the little dog still loved? Yet he did. He scrambled among the valentine satin and tried to wash her face back to what he knew.
They came home and her brother-in-law knelt down and kissed it, the square of the couch where she had lived, where she had lain among machines, where they had discovered, almost too late, that they could play patty-cake with her.
The koosh ball was accidentally thrown away, and little did the landfill know what was coming: the blue bursting star of everything she knew, never smaller by one ray.
“I would have done it for a million years,” her sister said, toneless. “I would have gotten up every morning and given her thirteen medicines. There is no relief. I would have done it for all time.” Then told of a bill she had received for $61,000. Then sent a picture of a vial of snow a nurse had gathered from that night, clear liquid asterisks, her snow.
Piles of discarded devices in landfills, with somewhere among them a koosh ball still flickering, trying to transmit—do you copy, do you copy, do you read, do you read. “I copy,” she said to the vibrating air, “I copy, I copy, I read.”
