"I can't help her. I can't stop what's happening. But I do things. I buy groceries, wash the clothes, pick up her meds. She spends her days in bed while a glacier of blankets builds up, layer by layer, around her."
"Around 1:26 a.m., the car—along with Zephyr and, presumably, my medium Carnivore's Delite—evaporated. Along that stretch, at this time of night, something marginally catastrophic may have happened, and I don't want to get into a whole big thing here, but this should, ideally, be concerning."
"Now that he's dead, it's time for my father to go. That's how my mother says it, anyway. She calls me one afternoon in September, six months after he sauntered back into the kitchen despite having just been buried."
"He's not unreasonable, he tells me. But he's genuinely alarmed by the extent of the first-round edits. Entire captions have been rewritten. Much has been cut. Actual names—the town hall—have been lowercased. Passive voice has been used."
"I've recently learned that the joke you've all been giddily repeating since it was told at last year's company picnic—the one about the wiener car—is once again being attributed to Chad. It was not Chad. It was me."
"Whatever your intolerable situation is, you’ve rightly decided to take a nice long coma until it all blows over. That’s where we come in—the Coma-Doze Clinic and Spa, where you can check in just to check out."