Status Updates From Signs Preceding the End of ...

She'd known families that were truncated, extended, bitter, friendly, guileful, doleful, hospitable, ambitious, but never had she known a Happy Family of the sort people talked about, the sort many swore to defend; all of them were more than just one thing, or they were all the same thing but in completely different ways: none were only fun-loving or solely stingy,

They kept walking. The black car slowed beside them, the occupants eyeballed for a few seconds and took off.

another truck pulled up right beside them on the road to the mountains; it was black with four searchlights mounted on the roof and the driver was an anglo with dark glasses and a hat with a silver buckle. His eyes shot bullets through the two windows between them, still stepping on it, still stuck to them like glue;

and he hesitated for a moment before he versed, and in the doubt flickering in his eyes you could see he'd spent his whole life there like that, holding back his tears, but before letting them out he turned and versed and only ever came back in the form of two or three short notes he sent a long while later.

She didn't want to stay there, nor have to endure what had happened to a friend who stayed away too long, [...] His mother was no longer his mother, his brothers and sisters were no longer his brothers and sisters, they were people with difficult names and improbable mannerisms, as if they'd been copied off an original that no longer existed; even the air, he said, warmed his chest in a different way.

Mr. Double-U was a joyful sight to see, all pale roundness furrowed with tiny blue veins;