Jo Ann Beard

“Instead of slapping her head, I do what they tell you to do: count to ten. Only I do it the gifted way: 123+456+789+10. When your sister has hurtled you swerving into the darkness, stranded you at a funeral home, and threatens to get you in trouble, just stop and count to 1,378 before you respond.”

“Sometimes when you're cruel to others, it's because you've gotten yourself into a situation you can't get out of.”

“It feels weird right at this moment to not be anybody's sidekick. Hard to explain, but when I look at the moon, it seems like it's paying attention to me, instead of me paying attention to it. It's way up there now. Hi, moon, I say silently to it. Yes, I'm high, it says back. The moon has a sense of humor.”

“In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.”

“The way everything seems to be working out right now, I wouldn't be surprised if I ended up dead before the night is over.”

“...within the souls of the awkward and the overlooked often burns something radiant.”

“In addition to Linda and me, there's a brother, a strange little guy named Bradley, obsessed with his own cowboy boots. He paces areound and around the house, staring at his feet and humming the G. I. Joe song from the television commmercial. He is the ringleader of a neighborhood gang of tiny boys, four-year olds, who throw dirt and beat each other with sticks all day long. In the evenings he comes to dinner with an imaginnary friend named Charcoal.'Charcoal really needs a bath', my mother says, spooning Spaghettios onto his plate. His hands are perfectly clean right up to the wrists and the center of his face is cleared so we can see what he looks like. The rest of him is dirt.”

“We sit silently in our living room. He watches the mute television screen and I watch him. The planes and ridges of his face are more familiar to me than my own. I understand that he wishes even more than I do that he still loved me.”

“On the very tip of his tongue is his Firerancher. Thin as tissue paper, it looks like the moon in the daytime sky. Suddenly love is looming over the car, as big and invisible as the ghost mountains of the Comobabi range. I smile at him and turn up the radio with my toes.”