Calypso

I insist that Carol eat in my presence for the same reason I wait for the coffee shop employee to turn back in my direction before putting a tip in his basket. I want to be acknowledged as a generous provider. This is about me, not them.

By that point in the evening she’d look different, raw, like you’d taken the lady she was earlier and peeled her.

if I weren’t so concerned about, for example, meeting my daily Fitbit goal, I’d realize there’s a six-hundred-year-old milkmaid living in our silverware drawer.

It’s beautiful, the Atlantic, but at the same time so insistent, always advancing, always taking what it wants.

“The last time Phil saw her, she leaned over in her wheelchair and at the top of her voice said, ‘Hitler wants my pussy.’”

“It used to be that whenever I passed a mirror, I’d look at my face,” Gretchen said, blowing out a mouthful of cigarette smoke. “Now I just check to see if my nipples line up.”