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556ab7c
|
You can ruin anything if you focus at it.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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7eafc9d
|
It was ridiculous, at times, how many tears one body could produce.
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tears
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Aimee Bender |
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2756bfe
|
This woman he met was the woman he met and however you try, you cannot unmeet.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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9cd48bf
|
Twice I'd come home as they were finishing, and, honestly, I cannot think of a lonelier sound on a Saturday night than one's roommate having a giant orgasm and then making an embarrassed sssh sound, realizing that maybe through her pleasure she'd heard the front door open and close.
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loneliness
roommates
sex
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Aimee Bender |
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be412d6
|
My soup arrived. Crusted with cheese, golden at the edges. The waiter placed it carefully in front of me, and I broke through the top layer with my spoon and filled it with warm oniony broth, catching bits of soaking bread. The smell took over the table, a warmingness. And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me. Warm, kind, focused, whole. It w..
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|
rose-edelstein
warmth
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Aimee Bender |
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f21087b
|
At lunch you order steamed vegetables because you're remembering that you have a heart too. You feel humbled by your heart, it works so hard. You want to thank it. You give your heart a little pat
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heart
vegetables
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Aimee Bender |
|
94f4a14
|
I wanted to marry wood. I wanted to chew down some two-by-fours, crawl inside a tree, slide elm into my aorta so that every beat of every second was a grand waltz with luck.
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Aimee Bender |
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27f0592
|
I am going to host Thanksgiving myself and instead of a turkey I'm serving a big human butt.
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Aimee Bender |
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f49df7a
|
I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down. By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had that same slight metallic, absent taste to them, and the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of far away and plastic. All of those parts hummed in the distance, and then the b..
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|
chocolate-chip-cookie
factory-farming
food-sensor
ingredients
layers
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Aimee Bender |
|
0174673
|
On the drive home, she sat in the backseat, as she did on occasion. He said it was to protect her from more dangerous car accidents; she liked thinking for a moment that he was her chauffeur, that she had reached a state of adult richness where you did nothing for yourself anymore and returned to infancy.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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c17d2ab
|
The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It's no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, lets the texter/ former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can't live propless.
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Aimee Bender |
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08a5ef7
|
She bops around really energetically but she's also still. Like she's moving her torso but her feet don't move, and then sometimes she'll take one step, and it feels like a thesis statement. Like it is a topic sentence about her butt.
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Aimee Bender |
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bcaa650
|
When she came back inside, she was gripping a yogurt cup someone had thrown near our side strip of garden. "Plastic doesn't cycle." She shrugged off her coat. "Right? We recycle it, but it can't do anything on its own, and all it can ever do is be itself again. It is the worst kind of reincarnation. Lame! That is so lame! And it's everywhere!" she cried, going to the bathroom to splash water on her face."
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Aimee Bender |
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bc06363
|
He had a good face to him, something chunky in his nose that I could get behind.
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Aimee Bender |
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b784a88
|
Your eyes shine," he said. "How do they do that?" "Blood," she said." --
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humor
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Aimee Bender |
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2ae5885
|
When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken a la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens.
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|
eating
wrong-order
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Aimee Bender |
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5857e01
|
That," she said, "is a little closer to how I imagine it works. Whether or not you pray has absolutely nothing to do with the person to your left. It's like saying you shouldn't get the moon in your window, or else the other cars wouldn't get the moon in their windows. But everyone gets the moon. It's not an option, to not have the moon in your window. You just see it. It's there." She bit her lip. The window in the office grew golden with ..
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praying
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Aimee Bender |
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450637a
|
With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works.
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|
humor
words
|
Aimee Bender |
|
1d5c046
|
It is difficult to want to tell a grave that it is not immortal. It's so obvious at that point.
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|
immortality
mortality
|
Aimee Bender |
|
3c2a28d
|
Don't smile," he said."
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
0ce9884
|
I think it's good to smile at everybody so that everyone knows you love everyone. It's good for human pacifism.
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|
humor
pacifism
smiling
|
Aimee Bender |
|
a3214d0
|
It can feel so lonely, to see strangers out in the day, shopping, on a day that is not a good one. On this one: the day I returned from the emergency room after having a fit about wanting to remove my mouth. Not an easy day to look at people in their vivid clothes, in their shining hair, pointing and smiling at colorful woven sweaters. I wanted to erase them all. But I also wanted to be them all, and I could not erase them and want to be th..
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
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c8400af
|
After the incident in the ER, Ino longer wanted to advertise my experience to anyone. You try, you seem totally nuts, you go underground. There's a kind of show a kid can do, for a parent - a show of pain, to try to announce something, and in my crying, in the desperate, blabbering, awful mouth-clawing, I had hoped to get something across. Had it come across, any of it? Nope.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
|
929dfe7
|
YOU'RE IN MY MOUTH, I said. GET OUT OF MY MOUTH.
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|
change
parents
relationships
|
Aimee Bender |
|
fc37f45
|
The afternoons were getting longer again, stretching. I stayed too long at a stoplight because the sunlight was so pretty, sifting through all the leaves on the sycamore trees lining Sierra Bonita, turning each a pale jade green. The jacaranda trees preparing for their burst of true lavender blue come May. Go, said Dad. Sorry, I said.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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3d3041f
|
Sono innamorata dello smettere. A suo modo e un'arte, se ci pensate. Smettere bene richiede un innato senso della bellezza; bisogna saper sentire il momento della svolta, proprio quando il desiderio fa la sua comparsa, quello e il momento di darci un taglio, giu deciso, l'istante in cui lo smettere e maturo come una pesca che si fa dolce sull'albero: crack, si spacca il picciolo, la pesca cade per terra, nera e argento di mosche.
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
5f2aa4a
|
Un tempo pensavo che la morte potesse essere nascosta da qualche parte sul nostro corpo. Acquattata dietro la pupilla come una moneta, infilata sotto un'unghia, allacciata attorno a un polso. Una scheggia scura, affilata; una pallottola pallida, libera. Una cosa diversa per ogni persona. La durata di ogni vita predefinita. Il giorno della morte, ti si scioglie dentro a tutto il corpo, calda pallina rotta di sali da bagno. Fino a quel moment..
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|
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Aimee Bender |
|
6d39dde
|
Il mondo puo anche chiederti di partecipare, ma la decisione di accettare la proposta viene presa di giorno in giorno.
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|
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Aimee Bender |
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53d2281
|
She was tired these days because she was having job trouble too; her trouble meant she did not know how she could be useful in her life. Dad's job trouble was he had too much to do with his life. Sometimes I just wanted them to even it out but I couldn't think of how.
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|
job-trouble
|
Aimee Bender |
|
69520e6
|
Nothing...They're from nothing,' he said. 'They came in the book...I found the book and inside were these flowers...They were in the book when I bought it... I bought it used...Because they meant something." 'To someone else.' 'To someone."
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|
books
flowers
|
Aimee Bender |
|
ff84650
|
The best way I can think to describe it, she said, ' is the way, when you're driving on the freeway at night how everyone can see the moon in their window. Every car on the road. Every car feels the moon is following that car, even in the other direction, right? Everyone in that entire hemisphere can see the moon and think it is there for them, is following where they go.
|
|
faith
god
moon
religion
the-doctor-and-the-rabbi
|
Aimee Bender |
|
99a4720
|
You can't predict the outcome. You can't raise a child and then tell them what to think.
|
|
parenting
raising-children
|
Aimee Bender |
|
52c16f1
|
Last day I saw him human, he was sad about the world.
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|
life
sadness
|
Aimee Bender |
|
4ce43ed
|
She could feel it brimming on her lips, that superstar smile, the bow shape, the teeth long and solid tombstones.
|
|
fake
smile
|
Aimee Bender |
|
0e5bdb0
|
I wanted to bathe in plum juice, rediscover my body and adorn it in kiwi circles.
|
|
fruit
|
Aimee Bender |
|
634e150
|
The room filled with the smell of warming butter and sugar and lemon and eggs, and at five, the timer buzzed and I pulled out the cake and placed it on the stovetop. The house was quiet. The bowl of icing was right there on the counter, ready to go, and cakes are best when just out of the oven, and I really couldn't possibly wait, so I reached out to the side of the cake pan, to the least obvious part, and pulled off a warm spongy chunk of ..
|
|
ingredients
lemon-cake
rose-edelstein
smell
|
Aimee Bender |
|
420ce13
|
My mother had been baking more often in general, but she took plates of desserts to the carpentry studio, where her boss, thank God, had a sweet tooth. He just loved the cheesecake, she'd tell me, shining. He ate all of my oatmeal cookies. Some charmed combination of the woodwork, and the studio people, and the splinter excising time with her son kept her going back to Silver Lake even when she hit her usual limits, and every night, tucked ..
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|
baking
lane-edelstein
scents
|
Aimee Bender |
|
0907924
|
In the evenings, my father and I ate dinner quietly in front of the TV together. Wednesday night, Thursday. Frozen dinners I'd picked out at the grocery store, greatest hits by my favorite factories. One of the best ones, in Indiana, prided itself on a no touch food assembly, which meant every step was monitored by robotic arms, ones that placed the tortillas into the dish, layered them with cheese, dropped dollops of tomato sauce on top, a..
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|
food-factories
greatest-hits
grocery-shopping
indiana
ingredients
rose-edelstein
|
Aimee Bender |
|
8cb8f2f
|
In those days, she let her hair loose, down to her waist, and whenever I met old friends of hers, they would describe my mother as having resembled a mermaid with legs. With a sheerness to her skin that people wanted to shield.
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|
|
Aimee Bender |
|
afb78e0
|
I started in our neighborhood, buying a pastrami burrito at Oki Dog and a deluxe gardenburger at Astro Burger and matzoh-ball soup at Greenblatt's and some greasy egg rolls at the Formosa. In part funny, and rigid, and sleepy, and angry. People. Then I made concentric circles outward, reaching first to Canter's and Pink's, then rippling farther, tofu at Yabu and mole at Alegria and sugok at Marouch; the sweet-corn salad at Casbah in Silver ..
|
|
emotions
food
moods
restaurants
rose-edelstein
walks-of-life
|
Aimee Bender |
|
e7e9cc3
|
My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the cou..
|
|
food-sensor
oranges
rose-edelstein
|
Aimee Bender |
|
84d9b9c
|
What I taste, I said, reading from my page, is what I remember from my last Dorito, plus the chemicals that are kind of like that taste, and then my zoned-out mind that doesn't really care what it actually tastes like. Remembering, chemicals, zoning. It is a magical combo. All these parts form together to make a flavor sensation trick that makes me want to eat the whole bag and then maybe another bag. Do you have another bag? asked a skateb..
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|
doritos
rose-edelstein
taste
|
Aimee Bender |
|
7c421a9
|
George Malcolm: half white, half black, with messy tousled hair, rumpled and tugged between kind of curly and extremely curly. Once, a year or so before, he'd been at our house and he'd pulled out a lock of his hair and used it to teach me about eddies and helixes. It's a circular current into a central station, he'd explained, giving me one to hold. I pulled on the spring. Nature is full of the same shapes, he said, taking me to the bathro..
|
|
george-malcolm
helixes
physics
shapes
spirals
|
Aimee Bender |
|
9f1804c
|
The sensor did not seem to be restricted to my mother's food, and there was so much to sort through, a torrent of information, but with George there, sitting in the fading warmth of the filtered afternoon springtime sun spilling through the kitchen windows, making me buttered toast which I ate happily, light and good with his concentration and gentle focus, I could begin to think about the layers. The bread distributor, the bread factory, t..
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|
buttered-toast
food-sensor
layers
wisconsin
|
Aimee Bender |