“Fifteen years ago I killed my sister.”

“We only have so much time, Mary,” I remember saying. “Time will kill you – it really will.”

“There were grandfather clocks and these things that were sort like half-grandfather clocks, and so many cuckoo clocks I suddenly felt like I was trapped in some weird pop-up book for little kids. It scared me so bad I just about had a stroke. That would have been pretty pathetic to die of a stroke at sixteen. Behind me there was this one particular cuckoo clock that looked about three thousand years old. This thing flew through the clock’s doors, and before I even realized what had happened, my hand shot up and broke it off. When I opened my hand, I was holding this totally deformed, premature-looking half chicken. It was maybe the evilest thing I’d ever seen in my life. For some reason I started kind of choking it. Now, I know that’s almost serial-killer nuts or whatever, and I’m not asking you to try to understand – I swear I’m not – but that’s what I did. I choked the thing between my thumb and forefinger as if my life depended on it.”

“I was so in love I went into my room and drank half a bottle of Robitussin.”

“My dad smelled sort of like mustard, which is probably due to the fact that in the bed I also discovered a thing of Hellmann’s. I wanted to grab it and squirt it in his eyes, but I couldn’t reach it.”

“It was like losing an important weight-bearing bone, and I knew I would spend the rest of my life trying to figure out how to walk the streets without it. ”

“At the funeral my stitches were itching like crazy, but it didn’t bother me much because I was like totally tripping on the codeine they’d prescribed for the pain. They cremated my mom and stuffed her ashes into a pine box and put an eight-by-ten photo next to it. In the photo she was wearing too much makeup and it made me want to smash it with my fist.”