No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

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.

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.

Sixty-year-old cartoonists had also tried to contend with the issue, but the best they could do was sad doodles of a person with a Phone for a Face who was scrolling through like a tiny little Face in His Hand.

Strange, how the best things in the portal seemed to belong to everyone. There was no use in saying That’s mine to a teenager who had carefully cropped the face, name, and fingerprint out of your sentence—she

“Did you read . . . ?” they said to each other again and again. “Did you read?” They kept raising their hands excitedly to high-five, for they had discovered something even better than being soulmates: that they were exactly, and happily, and hopelessly, the same amount of online.

He did not want to live in the world he had made, but when it came right down to it, did any of us?

“I cannot see the good in this,” her mother whispered in the small sheltered airspace of the car, where they had taken to having controlled mutual outbursts as soon as they left the house.