declined urination invitation a la who's next cover art, accepted central branch lower-level maritime room historian's microfiche search of that century + a dozen years ago catastrophe. (borges in my pantheon for his belief that paradise a library.) these flowers on this tree, they face me?
deify ancestors: our own stubborn effort, says beneatha. does your heart balance a feather? quetzalcoatl weather vanes prompt my prosthetic smile
illustrated a quote below. pardon me madame, you seem to have dropped your microphone. one pair unlike others: 🏈🏆 / 🎤💧 / 🦸🎳 / 🤩🦉
read never let me go by kazuo ishiguro. euphemisms between sentient lambs before slaughter, lies as large as louis the way you sing off key to ella
someone cleaned a toilet with his toothbrush so it was waiting for him with shit all over the bristles
we often had our most intimate conversations lying in the dark before we fell asleep
if you wanted to praise someone's work, you'd say: "that's good enough for the gallery"
people out there, like madame, who don't hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you - of how you were brought into this world and why - and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs. the first time you glimpse yourself through the eyes of a person like that, it's a cold moment. it's like walking past a mirror you've walked past every day of your life, and suddenly it shows you something else
i don't know how it was where you were, but at hailsham the guardians were really strict about smoking
if we were keen to avoid certain topics, it was probably more because it embarrassed us
soldiers in world war two being kept in prison camps. one of the boys asked if the fences around the camps had been electrified, and then someone else had said how strange it must have been, living in a place like that, where you could commit suicide any time you liked just by touching a fence. this might have been intended as a serious point, but the rest of us thought it pretty funny. we were all laughing and talking at once, and then laura - typical of her - got up on her seat and did a hysterical impersonation of someone reaching out and getting electrocuted. for a moment things got riotous, with everyone shouting and mimicking touching electric fences
none of you will go to america, none of you will be film stars. and none of you will be working in supermarkets..before you're old, before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs
the sex lectures..once, she brought in a life-size skeleton from the biology class to demonstrate how it was done. we watched in complete astonishment as she put the skeleton through various contortions
i still feel bad about it
your place in the wider world
so many of their mannerisms were copied from the television
the blankets often weren't even blankets, but a really odd assortment - old curtains, even bits of carpet. sometimes it got so cold you just had to pile anything you could over you, and if you were having sex at the bottom of it, it felt like a mountain of bedding was pounding at you
"are you the dynamic, go-ahead type?"
"look" with a staring eye drawn inside each "o"
we're modelled from trash. junkies, prostitutes, winos, tramps. convicts, maybe, just so long as they aren't psychos
norfolk..the lost corner of england
why are you looking through old porn mags for your possibles?
the natural course
i can't help picturing a swimmer taking a dive off the top only to crash into the cement
"i was pretty much ready when i became a donor. it felt right. after all, it's what we're supposed to be doing, isn't it?"
another flood of pain
one of those little islands of lucidity
three separate sketches of a kind of frog - except with a long tail as though a part of it had stayed a tadpole
washing her hands of everything
you've had good lives
no one will ever take from you
completed