Gods of Want Quotes

“There had to be an origin for ruin. I was suddenly jealous of that tornado, the way it tangoed on the page, the way her hand ran down its length like a spine. The photo was taken from the perspective of someone who loved it, and I wanted to be captured that way, to be chased from my body.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“Some mothers are fishhooks—they’re shaped to raise you, raise you out of the water for slaughter.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“the eighth widow taught me how to play blackjack; the eighth widow taught me the suits and what they meant: King means husband, queen means wife, spade is the shovel she buries him with.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“Sometimes she would say, The sun is a meatball, and I would joke by replying, And what is the daughter, and she would look at me and say, The daughter is a cutting board.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“one room full of poisonous flowers you water convince yourself this is a form of motherhood to love what you can’t touch”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“It was only a week after the wedding that my wife threatened to leave me, claiming that the chorus of dead cousins was straining her sleep, dicing her dreams fine with their fingers like pocketknives.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“I thought of the way mother cats carried their kittens by biting their napes and swinging them around, and I wanted to know what my teeth would do to that tender estate.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“They glued thorns into all the flower arrangements and stepped on my wife’s dress until it tore, baring her ass, and then they used the veil to run around outside and catch hairy moths in its gauze. They knotted my tie into a noose and hung it from the church ceiling like a chandelier, but I didn’t know how to kick them out once they were there. They brought gifts, fistfuls of worms and a downed telephone pole. They ate the cake and told us it was dry and asphalt-like. They farted in the minister’s face and shattered a stained-glass window depicting a nativity scene and said it was our fault Mary was beheaded and baby Jesus was crushed into an anthill of sand.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories

“She claimed she could read palms, but when I gave her mine, she kissed my palms instead of reading them. She said my hands were designed to catch the rain like coins, even though it never rained. Her hands smelled of raw chicken and vinegar and mine smelled of her spit. One of her cheekbones had a birthmark perched on it. I covered the blue spot with my thumb, felt her bone tremor beneath the skin, a seismic shift that lifted the car two feet above the street and collapsed every stoplight in a two-mile radius and temporarily dislocated the train tracks, jolting them into the shape of her spine.”
― K-Ming Chang, Gods of Want: Stories