How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood

because to feel pity in a pitiless place is no small thing.

You can tell it wants to be alive.

“But in Book Club,” she added, “I feel like the teacher they want.”

feels like time has a color and that color is beige.

for a while like it’s a diving board and the street is a twenty-foot pool.

And just like that, he plummeted into the ditch of memory.

How to look for shapes and layers. How to see that stories have a “meanwhile”—an important thing that’s happening while the rest of the story moves along.

“I suspect you could read the dictionary under a tree and birds would cease their singing in order to listen.”

Her oafish brothers had taught her to lead with her chin; in her world, the winner was completely right, the loser completely wrong.

People set their husbands afire, they nurse their dying mothers, they rob demented old men, they sing songs that bring listeners to tears, they kill a woman while drunk on love and 86-proof. The line between this and that, you and her, us and them, the line is thin.

If a parrot can tell me my name, then why can’t three years drop through a hole in the universe? What’s one more miracle?

I got out at the stick-colored end of April, and thanks to Harriet, I’ve made it all the way to the fully flowering now.

“Apologies require acceptance, so I thank you,” he says, nudging the bookends back into my lap. “But as I understand it, forgiveness flows in one direction only.”

never, not in his entire life, beheld a sight more entrancing.