Motherthing

by Ainslie Hogarth

Grown men with no way to communicate anger but screaming and punching walls and capsizing chairs and it would have made you feel the slightest bit bad for them if you didn’t also hate their guts. I guess that’s what rage is: the point where your words fail the power of your emotions.

When a lab monkey doesn’t have a mother, a cigarette-smoking man in a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses will give the monkey a rolled-up pair of socks and the socks become their mother. Or, more accurately, the monkey needs a mother so badly that it can project enough mother things onto the socks that they do the trick.

Nothing else matters but her pain, the biggest, loudest thing in the world, unimaginable, a way that people only ever expect to feel maybe once in their life, if ever at all, and maybe never even really recover from.

I took my foot out of his mouth so he could scream better. He pulled my chair closer to him and he kissed me. I tried to see if I could taste my feet in his mouth but I couldn’t.

What the helly

curl into my own hangover stench and loathe every second I’ve spent alive.

I love you, Carol. I’m sorry I wanted to kill you for a minute there, but I’m over it now.

A Good Woman can acknowledge your humanity while recognizing the fact that you also need to die.