“If there’s an online petition, sign, comment, and send as a private message to friends who should be more aware of important issues. Persist in commenting and sharing until weak from hunger, it’s time to go to Mr. Holmes Bakehouse for a midmorning croissant.”

“Owl unlocked the door before the sun rose, started the coffee, hot dog roller, and pizza lamp, mopped the floor, flipped the sign, stood behind the register in a cocoon of cigarette cartons, sweet tobacco behind its barrier of cellophane, a cold plastic spike through the nose.”

“He had to bury his mother. In the tiny mirror his face looked like his own but sweatier, seizing with the Boeing's jostle and shock. How many planes had he boarded today? All nausea, all innards in upheaval. His head, muddled puddle of a brain, defiant, worked in spurts. His wife guiding him gate to gate, plane to plane. It was agony conforming to new heights, to hit the ground. He was a ball juggled into the air, New Mexican air, Texan air.”

“Yes, I’m sure your dad paid for the beers. Of course the ice cream melted. The tampons were Playtex, not OB.”

“I tried that with Callie once, asking her about people in China, about a month ago when it was the holidays and things still felt new. She said I should ask about India instead, because “don’t they have that law in China about one child per couple?” Pretty sure she’s right. One child per, maybe two.”

“Over the coming week the remains would be added to the trough; two dozen runts so chalked-full of vaccines they would keep the whole drove of five-hundred healthy until spring.”

“I gave the #piles people the benefit of the doubt. We’d been through a trauma. School closed for three weeks after it happened. When it opened again, those old WWJD bracelets became popular. In case another disappearance happened, kids wanted other kids to think they were saved.”

“The kids asked if the old man Lily used to be also liked swinging. She said yes, of course, I made moving pictures, after all.”

“And still we remained empty. No quickening, no swelling, no children. It was 1907, and we were not mothers.”

“I did not inherit Mother’s auburn hair, but Father’s, which mother claims to have been dirt brown. Mother and I hardly resemble each other, except to be both tall of stature, with the square jaws and prominent brows of many who live in this area. Our shoulders are wide, not sloping like those of so many women, and there is enough meat upon us to be considered farm-worthy. We have the strength and agility to catch a flustered chicken and wring its neck without getting clawed, to chop firewood and do a man’s work in whatever weather happens along.”

‘

“I tell him, I only know words, not letters. We’ll switch gears, he says. A new chapter, The Pythagorean Identity. He tells me: an identity is a mathematical fact. Look at the equations. He says: They’re synonyms. I understand sameness, but I want to say: nothing is identical, though oneness is the root of identity. One is the same, a linguistic fact. The book says: Verify the identity. Like it’s all so simple. Like it’s just that easy.”

“and it makes you feel inadequate and threatened and lost so you get on a train that’s headed out of the city singing slow ballads to your disco heartbeat to slow it down but of course there’s no slowing down now the train is only getting faster “

“But it’s not enough to learn to float. Floating doesn’t get you where you want to be. You have to swim too. The shape of the lake is a giant bowl. There are no shallows. The Wallenpaupack is sixty feet at the deepest point, which doesn’t sound like much, but it feels much farther when you’re swimming up and not over, fighting the pressure like a kitten running with a strip of masking tape across its back.”