The man read and read, moving his lips; now and then his whole body started moving and then the words entered him like spirits, and began to work their mischief.

I updated my socials: “Not tryna go back and forth with you hoes.” I tagged Robert in the post, then put up a pic of me looking bored and captioned, “Stars were born for stages. Y’all have fun rolling round the gravel lot.”

I mean, some situations were better than others but I felt like I was able to make sex with almost pretty much anyone a decent and worthwhile experience for everyone involved.

The Origins of This Great Nation

There wasn’t anything special about us. We were just an average town. Porch swings, wading pools, split rail fences, pump jacks bobbing for oil on the horizon. Meetings at town hall were well attended, sure, but we weren’t some hotbed of insurgents. We didn’t subscribe to any one brand of politics. We couldn’t even be plotted onto your basic left/right binary. Our town had everything: pro-lifers who supported gay marriage, pro-choicers who opposed gay marriage, climate change deniers who owned solar panels, universal health care campaigners who preferred private insurance, creationists with degrees in biology and geology, loyal conservatives, staunch liberals, moderates, radicals, and ornery retirees whose only real issue was guns. And yet that winter we found ourselves united by a common sentiment. We were fed up with our country.

It was very early. Ernest had no business being awake because he had no job and knew no one, was on his way nowhere and had no prospects for the day. Nonetheless, he was hungry and couldn’t sleep.

Thursday, 10 December.

Giles shows us the sample mice and I am, as if for the first time, overcome with joy. Perhaps when I was a child I had feelings like this—but not in many years. I look, for instance, at a small gray mouse, smaller than the others, and it is as if I am seeing (anything) for the first time. He moves among his neighbors so swiftly and yet without error—as if on a track, as if held up by threads from above that prompt him. For reasons I cannot yet fathom, the edge of the enclosure is of great interest to the mice. I suppose there are no such edges in the so-called natural world. No one, not even we, are ready for them (though they are upon us). He sniffs there at the edge and his nose moves with almost impossible articulation.

It was a hard decision. God knows how long it took them to come to it. There were four of them, in a filthy, empty room, starving to death, and they hatched upon a plan. 

Four of them were on one side of a dim room. —I’m going to try it, said the first. The girl watched herself in the mirror as the young man approached. —I wonder, he said. I thought perhaps . . .

EDITOR’S NOTE. From abundant internal evidence it seems clear that the text printed below is the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have

Stand up, please, place your hand here, state your name clearly. Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery. Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?