Sublime

custodial

In even the best families, loved ones—however inadvertently—manage to destroy each other’s hope.

So soon. So soon. She hadn’t even begun the trip back. Back to her grandmother’s house in the city where the red shutters glowed, and already she had been called “gal.”

What’s as perfect as a girl stopped dead, midformation? Girl as blank slate. Girl as reflection of your desires, unmarred by her own.

D.L. was severely thin, thin in a way that suggested not delicacy but a kind of stinginess about how much of herself she’d extend to the space around her.

One of my favorite stories is about an old woman and her husband—a man mean as Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature of his whims.

When she called Kayla “fat and blundering,” I wasn’t sure if she was really talking about Kayla or about me. Sometimes I felt like she was laughing at me right to my face, like she and herself had become the “us” and I was the “them,” and the joke was that I didn’t know who was who. I figured that her comment was some kind of setup. She was trying

On some level he knew she behaved this way, but since the feather game, had not witnessed the raw, unpeeled core. How tormented, isolated, and strange.

He always thought of the sea as la mar which is what people call her in Spanish when they love her. Sometimes those who love her say bad things of her but they are always said as though she were a woman.