She said nothing After a moment he gave her a shake Haven’t you? I don’t know she said

And he takes to the roads and for the rest of his days he goes alone A hundred years away from his wife and children and everyone he once knew Searching in vain for a door in a hill so he might beg the kind strangers to set him back as he was before he met them

Shut up for a second, Cass said. She felt ashamed and confused, as if she were surrounded by tiny dead fragments of her body. Did you know, PJ said, looking back at his book, that the first part of the human body to form in the womb is the anus? Elaine looked at PJ with an expression of utter repulsion. What is wrong with you? Cass said. It’s just

Around you the woods yawn like a mouth packed with a million teeth,

I feel like if people knew they were mostly bacteria it would solve a lot of problems.

It was a measure of your success, of the night’s success, and yet – here at your moment of triumph – you felt a chill steal over you, eerily akin to that horrible sense you’d have in college when, working on an essay, you pressed the wrong key and accidentally wiped it; and the more you thought it couldn’t possibly just be gone, the more it wasn’t

The biggest joke God ever played was to create women’s bodies then put women’s brains into them, that’s what he said. Like leaving a poisoner in charge of a sweetshop.

It’s so cold it feels like little splinters of ice.

Rain explodes on the asphalt.