I'll Stop the World

by Lauren Thoman

The type of kid who doesn’t really need a leg up, because they’ve already got so many, but they keep sprouting more anyway, like some sort of overachieving mutant spider.

It’s not that I don’t care about my civic duty or whatever; it’s just that it feels a little like getting excited about a glass of water while the whole building burns.

the optics of having a massive inferno on the front lawn of a school that’s named after a couple who burned to death in that school—making me, their grandson, a morbidly twisted version of Buford County royalty—are not great.

“Being drunk doesn’t change how you feel about someone. It just gives you permission to say it out loud.”

The photographs would undoubtedly be beautiful. They just wouldn’t be real.

I don’t think fate causes things to happen, but once they do happen, they have significance.

It’s what doctors call an executive function disorder. So it’s like the ringleader in my brain is asleep most of the time, so whatever monkeys or clowns or contortionists feel like performing, they just run onstage and shove out whoever’s already there, since there’s no one to keep everything in order. Or sometimes they perform at the same time. Or maybe they merge into a single act. Just a free-for-all circus.” His arms waved around his head, pantomiming the internal chaos. “No one driving the ship, icebergs everywhere. Fun times.”

Too little has changed, probably because too many people like me are content to just sit on our asses and assume that everything will sort itself out. And if it doesn’t, that’s no big deal either, because we’ll be fine either way.