Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. 

On and off, from the slit in my blinds, I observed him, some other dude, and a lady with a broad, shaking rump who I guessed to be his mother carrying things out of the house: boxes, TVs, something covered in a baby blanket. I felt lame for wanting to be acknowledged in some way, for watching him shut them all in the van without looking back.

Aunt Satchie’s house is Victorian, which means it’s like a church exploded and got put back together in a slapdash, with little domes and steeples.

John and Sylvia fell asleep watching the movie and so they never learned the secret of Rebecca. 

And though Logic, little dictator, indicated otherwise, she now knew when and whom she would marry. 

When our martinis arrived we ate the olives first, plucking them from their toothpicks with our lips pulled back from our teeth, like horses.

I almost relish the memory of my mother’s eightieth birthday in the common room of the Winterthur mental hospital, as the nadir of this family’s disintegration. She sat there, curled up into a ball, her greasy ash-blond hair in a ponytail, wearing a pale blue terry-cloth tracksuit. 

The two men motioned again for me to sit. I walked toward the traffic and they called out to me, throwing in my direction either a salutation or an insult. If I had turned around, I could have heard them clearly, but I stayed facing in the direction I was going. As I approached the blur of cars, cows, and goats, I considered the extent of my suffering. 

Slaughter, she thought, is a formal and disciplined word. A processing for victual consumption. The splaying limbs and the horror, the scenes of crimes and battlefields, the flinging of children and catching them on bayonets just out of their mother’s reach, all that is metaphor, simile—the thing, in fact, which is not.