“Santa sips herbal tea as he waits for winter, peppermint steam mingling with crisp autumn air. He wanders into the bedroom and crawls under the blanket with me. We spend afternoons hidden from the world, only the soft crooning of the record faintly drifting in from the living room.”

“A circle is the same shape as our children’s eyes when they ask me what’s for dinner and all I can say is bread because Spiros is busy attaching square wheels to our cart since he says the angles will create both the “necessary drag” while going downhill and also deter robbers. “

“That night she goes out in joggers and a puffer. She walks miles through busy city neighborhoods and industrial wastelands, along a commercial thoroughfare, unnoticed.”

“Of course, Anne Boleyn wasn’t really Anne Boleyn, either.  I like to think she was Mary Magdalene, though I can’t know for sure.  And Mary Magdalene wasn’t really Mary Magdalene, either.”

“Abe wanted it to look like a dinosaur, with big teeth and hard scaly armor all over its body. I thought it should look more like a caterpillar, or a cocoon that some ultra-mega savior would spring forth from.”

“Her hands were trembling a lot and her lips were chattering. She reached for me and I ducked under one of the cables and hunched over the bed. It was the first time I’d ever been that close to her. Her hand was so dry and thin that it felt like I was holding a silk glove, the kind Anne Elliot, in the book, would have worn.”

“ But it is hard work, telekinesis. My sister grows thin and her shoulders roll forward and soon the smallest things make her tired. Just sitting on the couch in our living room, she sucks down bottle after bottle of water, and I imagine her as a wilting plant.”

“The younger sibling and a boy, Jonathan suffered the after-shock. The beatings in the tub with the belt buckle after his father stormed out. He’s told me how his sister comforted him when, finally, the house was dark and quiet and he lay whimpering.”

“You visit a Catholic church and get blessed by Saint Anthony. You confess everything in the stuffy booth and the priest is so horrified that he laughs. You visit a tarot reader and pull the card of Death. Gemini horoscope predicts: Life-Changing Shift of Energy, and you burn the magazine in the sink.”

“She belongs to a Wine-of-the-Month Club. Her nail polish never chips, not even while washing dishes, which her husband always does anyway. If she knew, she would probably deem me unfit to babysit—as if I’d actually squeeze him until his ribs cracked like delicious little breadsticks.”

“My girlfriend Sasha has been fired from her temp job for pressing her boobs against a glass conference room wall, 26 floors up. Our heater is broken, and so is our oven.”

“At the top, you brace yourself against the pitch as your father clambers up the sloped roof to the hatch. A hot wind rakes the top of the cornfields. From here you can see all the way to Marysville.”

“To learn beauty through the lack is how music unwinds its throttle. You must be quiet in its breathing, little avalanche. You are secondary. Every knot in a series must say this to its neighbor. If you listen closely, lace sounds like a pack of firecrackers wishing in little blasts.”

“I have to wipe down the spice bottles with disinfectant before using them and I worry that despite the bleach I’ll catch some kind of plague but I’m also tickled. My mouse is a fancy mouse.”

“Oh, Mary, oh woman clothed in sunlight, blessed above all women, a body soft as chalk. So rudely forced.”

“It was Bobby’s fifth birthday. He blew out the candles except for one, which he then proceeded to throw in my direction, being that he thought that I had stolen his Special Day.”

“She fills the closet of the guest bedroom with her new wardrobe and gets to work on the projects that you abandoned, that you came to dismiss as “beautifully impractical.”

“I want to throw the bear in the garbage. But I consult my parenting book to make sure. The book says that under no circumstance am I to throw the bear in the garbage. Children, it says, must learn to appreciate the gifts they are given. “Living with the bear will teach your child habits of gratitude and self-reflection.”

“But when I woke up the next morning there was only one left, his rounded fishhook eyes blinking, his terrifyingly translucent body pulsing as if the whole thing were his heart. I convinced myself that there had only ever been one goldfish, that it was perfectly normal for two separate but similar beings to melt into each other and become one without either having died.”

“If someone would have just cleaned it up, it would taken five seconds and we could all have gotten back to work. But, of course, if someone had just cleaned it up we would be living in an alternate universe in which the people who work in this office are competent, considerate, and capable of operating something with as many moving parts as a fucking sponge.”