“There are hundreds of dancers in front of him. Behind him. To the left and right. He’s surrounded by the variegation of color and pattern specific to Indianness, gradients from one color to the next, geometrically sequenced sequined shapes on shiny and leathered fabrics, the quill, bead, ribbon, plume, feathers from magpies, hawks, crows, eagles. There are crowns and gourds and bells and drumsticks, metal cones, sticked and arrowed flickers, shag anklets, and hairpipe bandoliers, barrettes and bracelets, and bustles that fan out in perfect circles. He watches people point out each other’s regalia. He is an old station wagon at a car show. He is a fraud. He tries to shake off the feeling of feeling like a fraud. He can’t allow himself to feel like a fraud because then he’ll probably act like one. To get to that feeling, to get to that prayer, you have to trick yourself out of thinking altogether. Out of acting. Out of everything. To dance as if time only mattered insofar as you could keep a beat to it, in order to dance in such a way that time itself discontinued, disappeared, ran out, or into the feeling of nothingness under your feet when you jumped, when you dipped your shoulders like you were trying to dodge the very air you were suspended in, your feathers a flutter of echoes centuries old, your whole being a kind of flight. To perform and win you have to dance true.”
—Tommy Orange, There There

“At this point you should probably accept the reality of global warming, of climate change. The ozone thinning again like they said in the nineties when your sisters used to bomb their hair with Aqua Net and you’d gag and spit in the sink to let them know you hated it and to remind them about the ozone, how hair spray was the reason the world might burn like it said in Revelation, the next end, the second end after the flood, a flood of fire from the sky this time, maybe from the lack of ozone protection, maybe because of their abuse of Aqua Net—and why did they need their hair three inches in the air, curled over like a breaking wave, because what? You never knew.”
—Tommy Orange, There There

“The system scared you so you thought you had to follow the rules, but we were learning that that shit was fucking flimsy. You could do what you could get away with. That’s where it was at.”
—Tommy Orange, There There

“Occasionally, over the years, when I’d felt abandoned and heard a voice in my mind say, ‘I want my mommy,’ I took the note out and read it as a reminder of what she’d actually been like and how little she cared about me. It helped. Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.”
—Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Your broad shoulders
my wet tears
You’re alive
and I’m still here
As some half-human
creature thing
Can you bring life
to anything?

Take this to make you better
though eventually you’ll die

If you don’t love me
don’t tell me
I’ve never asked you
and I’ve never asked why

It’s such a shame
she used to be so delightful

Well, whose fault is that
if it wasn’t mom and dad’s

Well, it must be yours

We’ll have none of that
no

—Wolf Alice

“My marriage came to an end, with consequences that were almost beyond my powers of anticipation. One such consequence was that a series of men confided in me about their marriages past or present. These weren’t my old buddies—my old buddies suddenly viewed me with a kind of fear. These were guys with whom I’d had friendly but arm’s-length dealings: a father at my kids’ school; the contractor who was painting my new place; or, to take an astounding case, my dermatologist…. Either these men had heard about my new situation or something about me, some post-apocalyptic air, had led them to sniff it out.”
—“The First World,” Joseph O’Neill

“After he had gone I could sleep and I was not lonely in sleep; and it did not really matter how late I was at work the next morning, because when I really thought about it all, I discovered that nothing really matters except not being old and being alive and having potential to dream about, and not being alone.”
—“Gold Coast,” James Alan McPherson

“A man wants his virility regarded, a woman wants her femininity appreciated, however indirect and subtle the indications of regard and appreciation. On Winter they will not exist. One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness