It is very cold outside, though less so inside the car, it seems, with the kufiyya lying across the dashboard, forming a coiled snake ready to strike.

They checked in at the hotel that A. called in his head Hotel Auschwitz, then he spent twenty minutes shitting.

There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.

At first, the descriptor “Unemployed, Age 34” had sounded almost like a criminal charge, but I’d gotten used to it soon enough.

“I said, you know, thank goodness it’s not autism,” Jenny said, so exuberantly that it took Marion a moment to register the joke.

On day fifty-one, a person on the radio said, For many Americans, this is the defining crisis of our lives, but all I had done that day was eat sugared mango slices and write a list.

There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation.

When I learned of his transgression I threw myself into Dante and Shakespeare, seeking to understand the world that I had failed to see.

When people start acting stupid I usually stop reading. Those people aren’t ready to be characters yet.

Heft of fur and polyester, heft of muscle and blood. Noises commingled, that syncing of bodies real and otherwise.