A House with Good Bones

I asked my phone if it was connected to the internet and it told me that it had a very close relationship with the internet. I attempted to pull up a web page and it informed me that it was not that kind of relationship.

If there was an Olympic sport for worrying, Mom would win the gold and then give it to the silver medalist because she was afraid that they might feel bad for losing.

Having a cat around means that there are never any unexplained noises. If something crashes or thumps or goes bump in the night, you think, 'It's that damn cat again', and don't worry about it.

Gran Mae had been racist, in that Southern heavily-in-denial way, where you think watching Oprah counts as having a black friend.

The problem with family is that they know where all the levers are that make you move. They're usually the ones who installed the levers in the first place.

They say you can’t go home again, but of course you can. It’s just that when you get there, somebody may have repainted and changed the fixtures around.

Strange, the powers you find sometimes, in a garden at the end of the road.

I could not pity the adult she had become, but I could pity the girl she had been.

She had on leopard-print leggings and an oversized T-shirt that read OREGON: FIFTY MILLION BANANA SLUGS CAN’T BE WRONG.

Waffle House at four in the morning is a liminal space occupied by long-haul truckers, bleary-eyed shift workers, and teenagers so high they can smell God’s breath.

I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. It was all so ridiculous. Gran Mae thought she could get me about my weight? I’d come out of academia. If she wanted to tear me apart, she should have commented on my doctoral thesis.

I could hop into an ER carrying my severed leg and squirting blood from the stump and the doctor would congratulate me on having dropped all that leg weight and tell me to keep up the good work.

(I am still not entirely sure what vicars are, since we don’t have them over here. I think they’re like cozy priests? As far as I can tell, they primarily exist in order to solve murders or be murdered on British crime shows.)

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

I am not spending twenty dollars on a candle,” said my mother. Phil pulled her to her feet. She was clearly favoring her ankle and had to lean on his arm. “For twenty dollars, it would have to give me an orgasm every time I lit it.” Phil made a small sound of emotional distress.

My phone informed me that it was absolutely talking to the internet, it was happy to talk to the internet, it loved talking to the internet, then as soon as I tried to check my email, it told me it had never heard of the internet and wasn’t entirely sure it existed.

My hair is a comb-eating monster that is technically “curly,” in the same way that a cassowary is technically a bird.

Like many family dynamics, it didn't have to be healthy, it just had to work.

I'm an archaeoentomologist. It's fine, you've never heard of me. I study insects in archaeological remains.

Anywhere there's people, there's a possibility of evil, wouldn't you say?

Anyway, give me a trash heap over a grave any day. A grave tells you how people act when they’re on their best behavior in front of Death. Trash heaps tell you how they actually lived.

Someday you’ll get to an age where you die a little whenever someone doesn’t get your movie references.

Mom is tough. It's easy to think that sweet people are weak, but if you look at all the stuff mom's lived through; she's nearly indestructable.

there was an Olympic sport for worrying, Mom would win the gold and then give it to the silver medalist because she was afraid that they might feel bad for losing.

Still, ecru. It’s like if you couldn’t decide on white or beige and combined the two for maximum blandness.

I would just like the universe to acknowledge at this point that I didn’t scream, or flail, or throw the jar, or scream “What the ever-loving FUCK!?!” or anything like that. I am a professional. I have uncovered teeth before, mostly in digs on the Black Sea, where it’s not so fraught if you turn up human remains. It’s

And she’s lost a lot of weight.” “I know. She says the doctor says she’s fine.” “They always say that when you lose weight,” I said grimly. “You could be shooting heroin twice a day and if you lost weight, it’d be ‘Just keep doing whatever you’re doing!

But nobody ever tells you what to do when you don’t die, when you’re lying there and something is touching you and you’re pretending to be asleep because everybody knows that monsters can’t get you as long as you’re asleep and your heart pounds but you keep not dying and you stubbornly remain conscious and it keeps happening.