"Aboard the gliding craft, a stewardess crawled down the aisle, over bodies and debris, telling people in each row to remove their shoes, remove sharp objects from their pockets, assume a fetal position. At the other end of the plane, someone was wrestling with a flotation device. Certain elements in the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn’t this suggest that the two forms of flight termination were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn’t think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. “Crash landing, crash landing.” They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact. They patted themselves for ballpoint pens, went fetal in their seats." - Don DeLillo, White Noise

Willie Master's Lonesome Wife

Most people are distressed, honestly enough, by their own dirt. Imagine the shit of a lifetime packed into tubs. It would be of comfort knowing it was yours. Still, the dirt of others is even more distressing. Pick another's nose, for instance. Proof enough? Well, that's my theory. We get used to it—our own—we get used to it. Soldiers get used to it. They get used to death, distress, and the dirt of others. Mothers, of course, get used to it. We whores get used to it. But all of us are harlots in ourselves, and soldiers: we get used to it—our dead breath and dying eyelight, bare basins and odd bodies—used to living in a trench. - William Gass, Willie Master's Lonesome Wife (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

unpreparing

I tell my boyfriend the news and his eyes light up. What if, he says, what if someone kidnapped the baby? For ransom, or to sell it on the black market? What if you tripped and fell and landed on your stomach?

I don't know, I tell him. He turns on the news, says, Come on, get to the terrorist stuff.

When he leaves to get coffee I imagine him spilling the coffee on himself, getting third-degree burns that fuse his fingers together. I imagine him getting stuck in the elevator, the cables breaking and the elevator plummeting him to his death, though the hospital is only three floors high. I wonder if it's possible that an air bubble got injected into his bloodstream in the crash somehow, that it will reach his heart and he'll go down, his heart exploding like a firecracker in an apple. - Linsay Hunter, "Unpreparing" (which you can read here) from her book Daddy's (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

going places

Laughing, telling stories, even a bit cocky, Beckman would finger the badge with his taxi number on it while his mother's eyes, with unblinking persistence, told him he was miserable, and his father, puffing a cigar against doctor's orders, sat quietly, politely killing himself, nodding, chuckling at the stories until Beckment left and he could stagger out of the room and grope down the wall to his bed. Behind the wheel, Beckman flicked the ignition key, squinted his mind's eye, and saw his father prostrate with a headache, and Beckman gunned the motor, gunned house and street, his mother's eyes and fathers rotten heart and headache. - Leonard Michaels, from the "Going Places" in his Collected Stories (part of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year "challenge.")

Mueseum of the Weird

She often made a joke about the last gift her grandmother sent, a single pair of red socks with a row of embroidered polar bears. She wore the socks, and when anyone remarked on them, she would say, those were the last present my grandmother gave before her passing.

She never would seriously say "passing." Her grandmother hadn't driven in years and likely wouldn't utilize the HOV lane, but June imagined the woman in a dirty red sedan, flipping the bird as she tore around a school bus and howling at the idea that a pair of socks could make so many people feel like shit. - Amelia Gray "Death of a Beast" from Museum of the Weird (book #1 of my 32 Books For My 32nd Year challenge)

dakota

From the outside it looked like the kind of building home to dental offices or some other kind of office wherein exacting measures were taken against decay. Or so I liked to think—that time spent at home would be spent cleansing, filling, improving something. It was a ten-story stucco thing with a short walk up to a glass door that opened automatically, as if the building could see you, or sense you, and didn't want you to touch it. - Ottessa Moshfegh "Dakota" from Sleepingfish 8

William Gass's In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is something I could quote from for the rest of my life, I think.

I've it before, remember?

Nobody else writes or can write sentences/paragraphs like this.

Mrs. Desmond is my right-hand friend; she's eighty-five. A thin white mist of hair, fine and tangled, manifests the climate of her mind. She is habitually suspicious, fretful, nervous. Burglars break in at noon. Children trespass. Even now they are shaking the pear tree, stealing rhubarb, denting lawn. Flies caught in the screens and numbed by frost awake in the heat to buzz and scrape the metal cloth and frighten her, though she is deaf to me, and consequently cannot hear them. Boards creak, the wind whistles across the chimney mouths, drafts cruise like fish through the hallow rooms. It is herself she hears, her own flesh failing, for only death will preserve her from those daily chores she climbs like stairs, and all that anxious waiting. It is now, she wonders. No? Then: is it now?

We do not converse. She visits me to talk. My task to murmur. She talks about her grandsons, her daughter who lives in Delphi, her sister or her husband—both gone—obscure friends—dead—obscurer aunts and uncles—lost—ancient neighbors, members of her church or of her clubs—passed or passing on; and in this way she brings the ends of her life together with a terrifying rush: she is a girl, a wife, a mother, widow, all at once. All at once—appalling—but I believe it; I wince in expectation of the clap. Her talk's a fence—a shade drawn, a window fastened, door that's locked—for no one dies taking tea in a kitchen; and as her years compress and begin to jumble, I really believe in the brevity of life; I sweat in my wonder; death is the dog down the street, the angry gander, bedroom spider, goblin who's come to get her; and it occurs to me that in my listening posture I'm the boy who suffered the winds of my grandfather with an exactly similar politeness, that I am, right now, all my ages, out in elbows, as angular as badly stacked cards. Thus was I, when I love you, every man I could be, youth and child—from from enough—and you, strangely ambiguous a being, met me, heart for spade, play after play, the whole run of your suits.

noon

She liked the idea of the houses we live in becoming our tombs. She said to the others, out at the bar:

"When we died they could just seal it off."

Julie and May liked the idea.

"Like the pharaohs."

"Except I wouldn't want to build a special house for it," Beth said. "Just seal off the old one, it'll be paid for."

- Brad Watson, from the story Noon (from New Stories from the South 2010)

Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713). They called him the first fiddler. Certainly the first fiddler to play a special violin that isn't special anymore but merely common and he is responsible for changing that: changing an item from special to not, and that is one thing that makes him famous. Died of playing the wrong notes for the king. - Deb Orlin Unferth, "Minute Lives of Great Composers", from Minor Robberies

Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine

Glad therefore was I when he took to spending whole days towards the bottom of the sea in that diving-bell of his, and I was left alone, could rush upstairs from the galley as many times as I wanted to, to see what sound that was. But there was nothing to see, nothing but the rafts of seeming trash Unguentine was bring up from below. Fat timbers and beams of some heavy, sea-soaked wood. Packing-crates as tall as a man and sealed with barnacles. Barrels and barrels of angular fixtures made of some once-fashionable metal. Coils of cable, rope. Nuts. Bolts. Screws. For days this went on. The polished diving-bell, glowing like the sun, bursting up throigh the waves, and Unguentine flinging open the hatch and hauling in by had and by winch ropes to which were attached, floated and pontooned, his latest finds, soon breaking surface and shedding sea-waters; then he would lash it all to the side of the barge, go under again. At night, weary and sopping wet, he would clamber stiffly on board with a basket of deep-sea clams tucked under his arm, bolt down his dinner, fall asleep at the pilot wheel. - Stanley G. Crawford, Log of the SS The Mrs Unguentine

I'd broken out with a pepperish acne and lugged back and forth in the hall as if I was inventing ways to destroy myself; it was as if somebody had caught me in the hall and blasted off a shotgun loaded with BB's at my face, two or three BB's making it into my brain and festering there for years to make me crazy. - Barry Hannah

leonard michaels

"And then I awoke as if from a nightmare and it was a brilliant morning. She was standing like a stork on one leg, pulling a stocking up the other. She said, "Hello," and her voice was full of welcome, but I saw she was too much in motion, already someplace else. Her eyes were pleasant, but they looked through mine as if mine weren't eyes, just tunnels that zoomed out the back of my head."
Leonard Michaels - "Making Changes"

bowden

"The matriarch is ill. She can't get up, so another matriarch comes over and lifts her to her feet with her tusks. But in a while she falls again, and this time she will not rise. She dies. Matriarchs from other families visit her. They stand over her giant body, their trunks delicately take in the air a foot or so above her. They nudge her carefully with their tusks.

We call this compassion. But of course we hesitate to say the word because we are speaking of elephants and we draw lines on the earth and we draw lines when it comes to other bloods." - Charles Bowden, Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing

breece d'j pancake

"I put on my jacket, go into the foggy night, walk toward town. Another hour till dawn, and both lanes of the Pike are empty, so I walk the yellow line running though the valley to Rock Camp. I keep thinking back to the summer me and my buddy Eddie tore that burial mount apart for arrowheads and copper beads gone green with rot. We were getting down to the good stuff, coming up with skulls galore, when of a sudden Grandad showed out of thin air and yelled, "Wah-pah-nah-te-he." He was waving his arms around, and I could see Eddie was about to shit the nest. I knew it was all part of the old man's Injun act, so I stayed put, but Eddie sat down like he was ready to surrender.

Grandad kept on: "Wah-pah-nah-te-he. You evil. Make bad medicine here. Now put the goddamn bones back or I'll take a switch to your young asses." He watched us bury the bones, then scratched a picture of a man in the dust, a bow drawn, aimed at a crude sun. "Now go home." He walked across the pasture.

Edide said, "You Red Eagle. Me Black Hawk." I knew he had bought the game for keeps. By then I couldn't tell Eddie that if Grandad had a shot at the sixty-four-dollar question, he would have sold them on those Injun words: Wah-pah-nah-te-he. - the fat of my ass." - Breece D'J Pancake, "The Honored Dead"

"Love is infinite and one. Women are not. Neither are men. The human condition. Nearly unbearable." - Leonard Michaels, "City Boy"

larry brown

"I suddenly remembered all that, going down the road after Sheena Baby, the way you will. I was afraid for some stranger to pick up Sheena Baby, because I didn't know what he might do or try to do to her. These days, you don't want to be hitching rides with strangers. There's too much that can happen. I didn't want to see anything worse than me befall her." - Larry Brown, "Falling out of Love" from Big Bad Love

get some young

"Swanly was a prescient boy. He hated that their youth might end. He saw the foul gloom of job and woman ahead, all the toting and fetching, all the counting of diminished joys like sheep with plague; the arrival of beard hair, headaches, the numerous hospital trips, the taxes owed and further debts, the mean and ungrateful children, the washed and waxen dead grown thin and like bad fish heaved into outer dark. He felt his own beauty drawn from him in the first eruption of sperm, an accident in the bed of an aunt by marraige whose smell of gardenia remained wild and deep in the pillow. Swanly went about angry and frightened and much saddened him." - Barry Hanson, "Get Some Young" from High Lonesome

the year of long division

The house was all in light. Expansive, pillared. Solid, and seemingly impenetrably windowed. Deliriously trimmed. It seemed to be growing. - Dawn Raffel, "Nightjars" from In the Year of Long Division

more proof that christine schutt should be read

Christine Schutt's newest, All Souls, did little for me beyond packing in a few wowwy phrases, but for some reason I still reserved her Florida and checked it out. I'm insanely glad I did. It is far and away one of the most beautiful books I've read in a long, long time. Blindingly great. So great, in fact, I guess I'll have to quote it two times in as many days.

Something else I never told Aunt Frances or Uncle Billy, how outside the Big House, down the hill of stone steps to the boathouse where the boats hung by chains under canvas drapery, near to where the pier was piled up and also covered against the snow, at the lookout of the prickly cedars, I saw, I saw a car fall through the ice. I saw the ice crack and steeple. I saw the back of the car sink. 'Help! help!' I was calling despite no one near enough to hear me. The ice was thunking open and taking the car down fast, talking: small sounds from the car, the ice sounding, awe, awe. I made my own noises moving backward, hand to my heart, heel in old snow. I was afraid to run.

In the spring there might have been talk of raising the car, but I never heard it. I lived in the bliss of mystery. I was allowed.

florida

"On almost any day, I was on my way to the mountains grinding bone and singing my story. It was my hobo's bindle. I carried it to anyone, to win friends and get attention from teachers." - Chistine Schutt, Florida