“He wanted to tell her, from the greater perspective he had, that to own only a little talent, like his, was an awful, plaguing thing; that being only a little special meant you expected too much, most of the time, and liked yourself too little. He wanted to assure her that she had missed nothing”

“Once more I'm out, at one A.M., in some store trying to purchase bedding plants. The cashier woman says, "They're three for five dollars. You sure you need eight?"I"m distracted, looking at this man behind me.She ask, "You're sure you want to cut it off at eight?"This guy behind me in the checkout lane is wearing a sweater vest and his arms bare. He's waiting with a hundred-dollar bill to pay for Twizzlers and a porterhouse steak.Which leads me to look down at my own self.Do I know you?" he asks softly.No," I say, sighing. "Not in the way you mean.”

“Something else that makes me angry is that I got too old to prostitute myself. I wasn't going to anyway but it was there, it was my Z plan.”

“He felt like a man in a small boat under which a huge sea creature has passed, causing the boat to pitch gently. Like a man in a boat, he could chase it or run from it, and he picked chase. If he felt it on her lips, he put his mouth on her lips. If he found it on the palm of her hand, he opened her hand and licked it up. Her soul darted here and there, sensitive as any creature, tipping her center of balance back and forth as it oscillated. She liked this, and if she had any fear, she did not take it seriously. He liked it, too, so much that he could barely concentrate on the chase.”

“I tried to show him things, but he didn't seem to study what I showed him. Usually, he just put whatever I handed him in his mouth. He would try to eat anything. I fed him Tabasco sauce and he yelled. Having a little brother helped me learn to relate to other people. Being a little brother, Snort learned to watch what he put in his mouth.”

“―I love you. He breathed down the side of my neck.I nodded. ―I love you too. And the smile on his face when he leaned back, so wide, so arrogant, so relieved, so smug, was not to be missed. I had created a monster with four little words.”

“Soon I was spending all my time in the basement, and I had moved from taking things apart to putting new things together. I began by building simple devices. Some, like my radios, were useful. Others were merely entertaining. For example, I discovered I could solder some stiff wires onto a capacitor and charge it up. For a few minutes, until the charge leaked away, I had a crude stun gun....So I decided to try it on my little brother. I charged the capacitor to a snappy but nonlethal level from a power supply I'd recently removed from our old Zenith television.'Hey, let's play Jab a Varmint,' I said. I tried to smile disarmingly, keeping the capacitor behind my back and making sure I didn't ruin the effect by jabbing myself or some other object.'What's that?' he asked, suspiciously.Before he could escape, I stepped across the room and jabbed him. He jumped. Pretty high, too. Sometimes he would fight back, but this time he ran. The jab was totally unexpected and he didn't realize that I only had the one jab in my capacitor. It would be several years before I had the skill to make a multishot Varmint Jabber.”