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352 pages, Paperback
First published June 11, 2024
your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.
fee fi fo fum, don’t do drugs, have sex, or cum.
if the cardinal of utrecht and the cardinal of bamberg build a summer house in naples, will it help the leper’s stammer?
if the moon is waxing gibbous and the limpid limpets shimmer, who is watching from its zenith as the bursar carves its dinner?
he wondered when he’d be able to think of himself as a woman, when it would feel anything less than mortifying to think “she” instead of letting the leaden weight of “he” drop from his tongue.
a thing that had seemed like the end of the world until life in its wake kept unfolding with its relentless, monotonous procession of bills and work and dates and oil changes, until years of dodging truant officers and landlords and the dead-eyed drones from california’s child and family services department left it lumped alongside the wars in iraq and afghanistan and the subprime mortgage crisis and the opioid epidemic and penal slavery and every other miserable thing you had to ram into the back of your mind to get out of bed in the morning and push yourself through another day emptying grease traps.
he’d never thought it would wind up here, kids held at gunpoint by grown-ups, a toe on the last line of the unspoken pact between their worlds: if you obey me without question, I won’t kill you.