No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

Our mothers could not stop using horny emojis. They used the winking one with its tongue out on our birthdays, they sent us long rows of the spurting three droplets when it rained. We had told them a thousand times, but they never listened—as long as they lived and loved us, as long as they had split themselves open to have us, they would send us the peach in peach season. NEVER SEND ME THE EGGPLANT AGAIN, MOM! she texted. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE COOKING FOR DINNER!

I have eaten the blank that were in the blank and which you were probably saving for blank Forgive me they were blank so blank and so blank

you averted your eyes from the ones who were in mad grief, whose mouths were open like caves with ancient paintings inside.

why, in her most solitary moments, did she find herself humming the jingle for the local accident-and-injury lawyer, which was so catchy that it almost seemed to qualify as a disease?

Dread rose in their hearts upon hearing the worst seven words in the English language. There was a new law in Ohio.

There was a channel that played the baby in fuzzy black and white, looking like she was about to steal a pack of cigarettes from a convenience store. They tuned into it at night, all of them in their separate beds, and this is what she used to think the angels did, watch the channel that played her.

His grasp of such subjects had always been limited. He believed, for instance, that sexism was when someone was “mean to Mary Tyler Moore.”

Her face was luminous, as if someone had put flesh on the bone of the moon,

“My battery is low and it is getting dark,” the Mars Rover said in the portal.