He was a container inside a container filled with containers contained by space—and somehow this made him full.

Everything’s a room, he realized, too late. The cars on the interstate nothing but rooms with wheels. The endless prescription bottles. And the body, too, a room, and so is the heart. So is the cell in the blood spilling back to the world, only to be contained by more world, which keeps even the atoms that make up the Styrofoam cups and trays sloug

“Everyone’s scared,” Hai continued. “It’s just like those stupid corn breads we give out every day. They all have this thin golden-brown crust, but ninety-nine percent of those things are just soft, mushy cake with a shit ton of sugar. So you don’t have to be anybody’s soldier. You can be a person doing what you do every day and that’s fucking enou

Only in springtime, it seemed, does gravity work backward here, the dandelion pollen rising in great squalls, the flower buds shooting up, further from the ground, as if pulled by the sky’s sudden need for them, all of it under the crisp brilliance of April sunlight.

“They’re just scared somebody will look at them bad and judge ’em. Scared somebody will see through the fake-ass armor they’ve wasted their whole lives building. And for what? To have fucking dysentery while a bunch of people who think you’re some god walk into a wall of bullets? Don’t you see it? We all want some story to make it bearable so we ca

“Most people are soft and scared. They’re fucking mushy. We are a mushy species. You talk to anybody for more than half an hour and you realize everything they do is a sham to keep themselves from falling apart. From prison guards to teachers, to managers, psychiatrists, even fathers, anybody—even your stupid generals. People put on this facade of

“You’re—” she gestured at him, “a liggabit. Boy and boy, girl and girl. I see them in newspapers. Liggabit community.” “Oh—oh, you mean LGBT?” He wiped his eyes and let out a single disbelieving laugh. She shrugged. “Yeah, I’m a liggabit.” “A liggabit soldier,” she said, her head slipping to the side. “Must be rare.”

The superpower of being young is that you’re closest to being nothing—which is also the same as being very old. “You can ride a thought in and out of somebody, and it’ll do so little damage, you think anything’s possible.

“With him,” he said, “it wasn’t that I was happy—but that I was okay. And okay was even better than happy because I thought it had a better chance of lasting.” He turned and was startled to find her staring right at him. “Okay is underrated. You know what underrated means, right?” “More than what the Lord planned,” she said. “Yes. And we were very