the acrid smell of the burnt teakettle was curling up in the back

Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy. My wife was no longer my wife but a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers.

Three morbidly obese hill people on motorized scooters are between me and my morning coffee. Their asses mushroom over the sides of the contraptions, but they still need another Egg McMuffin. There are literally three people, parked in front of me, in line, inside the McDonald’s.

My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all.

glib.

I suppose it’s not a compromise if only one of you considers it such, but that was what our compromises tended to look like. One of us was always angry. Amy, usually.

(How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)

Ironic people always dissolve when confronted with earnestness, it’s their kryptonite.

and we all eat small plates of food bites that are as decorative and unsubstantial as we are.