Fiction
I drive slowly and I know people are angry at me—hitting their horns and cursing, giving me the finger. I just smile and keep going.
Vivek prided himself on bringing order to chaos. Lowly intern that he was, Vivek was the face of Ward 10.
By age sixteen, he’d won a full scholarship to Emory College. By eighteen, he was convinced that my mother was sucking the life fluids out of his brain and went after her with a bread knife.
The last words Mrs. Sommers said to her husband were: “And don’t let that girl have the run of the house.”
He had a face that belonged in a Soviet bread line, waxen and expressionless, with skin tags and papules sprouting up from beneath the rough surface.
With the fat stripped away, she is her essential self. They don’t tell you how beautiful people can be when they’re dying.
From the moment my friend George stepped from his loft to his death at the bottom of the building’s elevator shaft, there’s been one thing I can say I’ve known for sure—that love is dangerously overrated.
“Every family has one,” my sister Joyce liked to say. “One crazy uncle or aunt they can’t hide or forget.”
Something nobody warns you about, when you get very sick, is that you have to be polite. You have to be Emily f-ing Post every minute of the day,