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244032d
|
Joseph would reach out to me occasionally, the same way the desert blooms a flower every now and then. You get so used to the subtleties of beige and Brown, and then a sunshine-yellow poppy bursts from the arm of a prickly pear.
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Aimee Bender |
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3e2dafd
|
When we sleep together, he holds me like he loves me. I've noticed this: when it's the first date, and you fuck, the guy holds you much better than he does the next few times. The first date, you're sort of a stand-in for whomever he loved last, before he fully realizes you're not her, so you get all this nice residue emotion.
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Aimee Bender |
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b5fef31
|
My genes, my love, are rubber bands and rope; make yourself a structure you can live inside.
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Aimee Bender |
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4bb5c21
|
I loved my brother, but relying on him was like closing a hand around air.
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Aimee Bender |
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529c7d5
|
It's unsettling to meet people who don't eat apples.
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untrusting
eating
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Aimee Bender |
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272d74d
|
I admired that stride; it was like he folded space in two with it.
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Aimee Bender |
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b1d4a15
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But the sky is interesting, it changes all the time.
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observations
interesting
sky
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Aimee Bender |
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5c697d4
|
There was love to be felt, and discovered, still.
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color-master
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Aimee Bender |
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94abda0
|
Walk soft, like whispers.
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whispers
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Aimee Bender |
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301b278
|
And in it all, the sensation of shaking my fists at the sky, shaking my fists high up to the sky, because that is what we do when someone dies too early, too beautiful, too undervalued by the world, or sometimes just at all -- we shake our fists at the big, beautiful, indifferent sky, and the anger is righteous and strong and helpless and huge. I shook and I shook, and I put all of it into the dress.
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grief
death
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Aimee Bender |
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df4399a
|
Mom's smiles were so full of feeling that people leaned back a little when she greeted them. It was hard to know just how much was being offered.
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Aimee Bender |
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d027b30
|
They'd been married for years, and he wanted her to give up the last thread of cover so she would stand before him nude and he could make love to her entire skin. Well, of course that made her head fall off. Of course.
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Aimee Bender |
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a149470
|
He had set up a telescope on a corner of the roof, and we went up to take a look. This is time travel, he said, narrowing an eye to set the lens. Because the light is old. We're seeing back in time. No, we said, wrinkling our noses. We are seeing right now, today. No, he said, the light has to travel to us and it takes millions of years. What you're seeing is time. Excuse me, we said. We were embarrassed to correct him. He seemed so smart...
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time
time-travel
time-passing
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Aimee Bender |
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226d9bf
|
but the rest of the evening is nothing but the trembling edges of something I am so tired of feeling and I do not want to feel anymore.
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Aimee Bender |
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fcc3489
|
It is these empty spaces you have to watch out for, as they flood up with feeling before you even realize what's happened.
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spaces
flood
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Aimee Bender |
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7429113
|
I like to smile at the men who look mean so they know I believe in their better selves. That makes a difference in the world. This is how you might be able to reform a possible rapist without ever going to psychology school.
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humor
make-a-difference
smiling
psychology
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Aimee Bender |
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588ce89
|
My birthday is in March, and that year it fell during an especially bright spring week, vivid and clear in the narrow residential streets where we lived just a handful of blocks south of Sunset. The night-blooming jasmine that crawled up our neighborhood's front gate released its heady scent at dusk, and to the north, the hills rolled charmingly over the horizon, houses tucked into the brown. Soon, daylight savings time would arrive, and ev..
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hair-color
rose-edelstein
plants
march
spring
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Aimee Bender |
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2d41bfb
|
He breathed in her hair, the sweet-smelling thickness of it. My father usually agreed with her requests, because stamped in his two-footed stance and jaw was the word Provider, and he loved her the way a bird-watcher's heart leaps when he hears the call of the roseate spoonbill, a fluffy pink wader, calling its lilting coo-coo from the mangroves. Check, says the bird-watcher. Sure, said my father, tapping a handful of mail against her back.
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Aimee Bender |
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b26ad18
|
The people were all busy in their cars, listening to the radio, so there was no one to smile at, so I just sent my love to the traffic lights. No one ever appreciates them, all day long, working so hard to turn red and yellow and green, right in time with us to make sure we don't crash into each other. If there was any tiny chance, even the tiniest chance, that they happened to be alive, I bet I was the first person ever to tell them they w..
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Aimee Bender |
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c9c3463
|
I will never die, thought the cake to itself, in even simpler terms, as cakes did not have sophisticated use of language.
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Aimee Bender |
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6d8d182
|
Ponytail girl leaned over and she and the tall boy kissed and it was carcinogen gums and magical.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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4283464
|
part of trying to attract those poet-men was to look a little like I had wandered onto campus by accident after having spent ten years with the wolves behind some farmhouse, living off scraps and reveling in the pure air like a half-girl Mowgli, half-woman Thoreau.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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d8edc01
|
He said, I always thought the woman I'd marry would hit me easy, in a bolt of lightning, and there is not lightning there is not even thunder there is not even rain.
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|
marriage
woman
|
Aimee Bender |
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1ac1d3c
|
In general, I call her every night, and we talk for an hour, which is forty-five minutes of me, and fifteen minutes of her stirring her tea, which she steeps with the kind of Zen patience that would make Buddhists sit up in envy and then breathe through their envy and then move past their envy.
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|
tea-lovers
zen
tea
patience
|
Aimee Bender |
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3295039
|
But truthfully? Let me tell you what I honestly think. I think, maybe he hasn't even noticed that I'm gone. But. I have.
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life
missing
|
Aimee Bender |
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886ed56
|
One could not spend one's life in the imaginings of another life.
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|
live-your-own-life
living-in-the-present
|
Aimee Bender |
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6fd4d51
|
I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.
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|
language
|
Aimee Bender |
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ac830bd
|
when he closed his eyes, the torrent of longing waiting inside was so thick he thought he might drown in it.
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|
love
longing
eyes
|
Aimee Bender |
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ca569ab
|
We are all, generally, symmetrical: ants, elephants, lions, fish, flowers, leaves. But she was a tree. No one expects a tree to be symmetrical at all.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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4d492e2
|
I'd stopped waving to passengers in cars by then- I'd grown suspicious of people and all the complications of interior lives- so I sat and watched and rode and thought, and as soon as the bus doors opened, we all rolled out the doorand split apart like billiard balls.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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c394e30
|
The address label wouldn't come off so I put the ripped electric bill back in its stack by the phone. On top of all the other bills, all the papers that ran the house invisibly
|
|
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Aimee Bender |
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191e70d
|
Because when, previously, they had wrenched a book out of his hands, he had stared into space so disconcertingly it made the rest of us feel like putting a bag over his head. Sometimes, if he didn't have a book, to occupy Joseph's eyes I would plant a cereal-box side panel in front of him, and his eyes would slide over and attach to the words, as if they could not do anything but roam and float in the air until words and numbers anchored th..
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
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e757f01
|
Being there was like having a good cry, the clearing of the air after weight has been held.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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3ccf851
|
And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it's better than smoking, that's what I say. It's the new, lung-safe cigarette.
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|
cell-phones
cigarettes
smoking
|
Aimee Bender |
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a937eac
|
Most teenage girls don't give old people the time of day which is sad because all old people do all the time is think about how nice it was to be a teenager so long ago.
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|
elders
listen-to-your-elders
observations-on-life
teenagers
aging
|
Aimee Bender |
|
59e4734
|
La gente si accorge solo di quando te ne vai; se resti non se ne accorgono. E' come quando si sente davvero un ronzio continuo solo dopo che ha smesso.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
|
f79baac
|
During the descent, she gave the doily to the man across the aisle, worried about his ailing son, and the needlework was so elegant it made him feel better just to hold it. That's the thing with handmade items. They still have the person's mark on them, and when you hold them, you feel less alone. This is why everyone who eats a Whopper leaves a little more depressed than they were when they came in.
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
6abd666
|
Sherrie would be there, and the last time I'd seen her at a social event she burst into tears when she saw me and ran out of the room. You're upset, I'd yelled after her, meanly.
|
|
magic-power
upset
snark
|
Aimee Bender |
|
a6e18a4
|
In Murakami's short story 'The Kidney-Shaped Stone That Moves Every Day,' the main character is a writer. In describing the act of writing to a tightrope walker, he says, 'What a writer is *supposed* to do is observe and observe and observe again, and put off making judgments to the last possible moment.' I think that is a beautiful description of writing; it lets the world be, but also there is a moment, finally, of some kind of opinion. T..
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
0355230
|
In other words, don't be reductive. Often, writers will rush to an ending that completes, or sums up, or reduces their story as opposed to moving to a place where it goes to something they may not understand and that may be incomplete but is more honest. That rush doesn't do a service to anyone. It doesn't do a service to the work, and it doesn't do a service to the reader. We know that things are complex; we want things to be complex so th..
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
39cd249
|
I asked them: Does it hurt? And the scar people nodded, yes. But it felt somehow wonderful, they said. For one long second, it felt like the world was holding them close.
|
|
pain
life
|
Aimee Bender |
|
538c457
|
We're like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.
|
|
funny
humor
love
|
Aimee Bender |
|
0431d8c
|
Her blush was the color of a coral reef, but smooth.
|
|
coral-reef
|
Aimee Bender |
|
62572ce
|
Then he sat down at the table of a larger man, a man with tattoos but the old kind, before tattoos became dainty and about spiritual life. The man wore tattoos from the time when tattoos meant you liked to kick people around.
|
|
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Aimee Bender |