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It’s such an intimate thing, to witness another’s death.
Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.
learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.
You can’t be a woman without protection. Condoms fail. Pepper spray can be turned against you. Information almost never does.
Information is like a feral cat: what it wants most is to be free and to bite someone.
Who am I to stand in the way of the call of the wild.
The only people to whom a lifestyle comes naturally are the very rich or the exceptionally famous. Everyone else is just trying to hardscrabble an existence about which they don’t feel an unendurable level of shame.
She removed herself from the world, and the world moved on.
By the end of the summer, my mother had given up hope, and my father had no choice but to hold her hand as she let go her life, a little bit day by day. She briefly went into the hospital, but she refused to stay. She didn’t want more pain; she didn’t want to prolong her days or forestall the inevitable black.
From my mother, I learned that beauty was armor. From my teenage friends, I learned that femininity was junk. They were both right.
knew from a young age that motherhood was a cage I never wanted to inhabit. Children make me turn on the oven and reach for the rosemary.
His head lying on my left breast, Andrew sighed deeply. “It’s really nice to see you.” He snuggled his face into my bosom and sighed again. “It feels like the last decade was a dream.” He nosed closer to my heart. He needed to die.
Starvation is the most easily understood reason for cannibalism. Pressed close to death, even a vegan will make a meal of man meat.
I am a prisoner first, foremost, and always. I’m here for life, which is to say I’m here to die, slowly, incrementally, bits of me failing as the New York State Department of Corrections struggles to keep me alive. It’s a touch paradoxical, really, the fact that one of my few rights as a prisoner is the right to health care, given that I’m here for life. Unlike you, I will get the best health care that your tax money can provide. For richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, ’til death do us part: a life sentence is like being married, but without the handholding.
Even vegetarians are complicated; after all, the mark of an absence is itself a presence, and vegetarians’ sanctimony is a lively chorus of apparitional cows, pigs, sheep, chickens, and fish. Our lives, regardless of our choice to eat meat or not, and regardless of the meat we eat, are so filled with death and killing we might as well plant ourselves atop an abattoir and call it a day; our bodies are charnel houses, memento mori for the countless critters we’ve eaten, and the American industrial meat complex enables our complicity with its cellophane-wrapped acts of oblivion.
Our female friends, the close ones, are the mini-breaks we take from the totalitarian work it requires to keep up the performance of being female.
learn nothing else from me, learn to add fennel to legumes when you cook them; it makes lentils sing.
