Aimee Bender

“Don’t smile,” he said.”

“Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows. As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.”

“He said, I always thought the woman I’d marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain.”

“It was the kind of conversation you could only hold in whispers.”

“Sherrie would be there, and the last time I’d seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You’re upset, I’d yelled after her, meanly.”

“My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.”

“As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.”

“Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held.”

“It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.”

“Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and Brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.”

“YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.”

“We have better things to do. We realize life is not just a dress rehearsal and if you realize it, you don't need a bumper sticker to remind you.”

“I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.”

“We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.”

“While she cut the mushrooms, she cried more than she had at the grave, the most so far, because she found the saddest thing of all to be the simple truth of her capacity to move on.”

“Pain was no longer a mystery to him, and a man familiar with pain has entered a new kind of freedom.”

“I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls.”

“Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.”

“I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.”

“We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.”

“It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.”

“Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn't love me - I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.”

“You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground.”

“The address label wouldn't come off so I put the ripped electric bill back in its stack by the phone. On top of all the other bills, all the papers that ran the house invisibly”

“He made a good salary but he did not flaunt it. He’d been raised in Chicago proper by a Lithuanian Jewish mother who had grown up in poverty, telling stories, often, of extending a chicken to its fullest capacity, so as soon as a restaurant served his dish, he would promptly cut it in half and ask for a to-go container. Portions are too big anyway, he’d grumble, patting his waistline. He’d only give away his food if the corners were cleanly cut, as he believed a homeless person would just feel worse eating food with ragged bitemarks at the edges – as if, he said, they are dogs, or bacteria. Dignity, he said, lifting his half-lasagna into its box, is no detail.”

“I peeled the skin off a grape in slippery little triangles, and I understood then that I would be undressing every item of food I could because my clothes would be staying on.”

“Several of the girls at the party had had sex, something which sounded appealing but only if it could happen with blindfolds in a time warp plus amnesia”

“Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.”

“But I loved George in part because he believed me; because if I stood in a cold, plain room and yelled FIRE, he would walk over and ask me why.”

“That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, he was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I'd always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph's part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.”

“I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.”

“I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.”

“I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...”

“I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.”

“I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.”

“You're the perfect girl', he said, rubbing his chin. 'You expect nothing.”

“...after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.”

“Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.”

“When the light at Vernon turned green, we stepped into the street and George grabbed my hand and the ghosts of our younger selves crossed with us.”

“I knew if I ate anything of hers again, it would lkely tell me the same message: help me, I am not happy, help me -- like a message in a bottle sent in each meal to the eater, and I got it. I got the message.”

“My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope - make yourself a structure you can live inside.”

“When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I've noticed this: when it's the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you're sort of a stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you're not her, so you get all this nice residue emotion.”

“There's a gift in your lap and it's beautifully wrapped and it's not your birthday. You feel wonderful, you feel like somebody knows you're alive, you feel fear because it could be a bomb, because you think you're that important.”

“Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.”

“My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher’s heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves.”

“I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.”

“I give boring people something to discuss over corn.”

“...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.”

“That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in. Nobody cooked that burger.”

“To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.”