No One Is Talking About This

by Patricia Lockwood

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.

Every day their attention must turn, like the shine on a school of fish, all at once, toward a new person to hate. Sometimes the subject was a war criminal, but other times it was someone who made a heinous substitution in guacamole.

She stepped back, alarmed. Had she committed a Brexit? It was so easy, these days, to accidentally commit a Brexit.

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.

“GET DOWN HERE AND OPEN MY SAFE!” She had tried every number that she could think of—the sex number, the antichrist number, the twin towers number—but he grimly took the safe from her and freed it with 1-2-3-4.

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.

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

“I was just thinking that you and I . . . have seen very different memes in our lives.”