A Wolf at the Table

I came to think that maybe God was what you believed in because you needed to feel you weren’t alone. Maybe God was simply that part of yourself that was always there and always strong, even when you were not.

God, I felt certain, did not mind that I didn’t press my hands together to pray. I was casual, but I was sincere. I knew that God existed as the Correct Answer inside my chest.

Nothing made sense to me anymore. I knew I was young, I knew I was small. But I was worried that I might already be ruined.

I knew I had an ugly life. I knew I was lonely and I was scared. I thought something might be wrong with my father, wrong in the worst possible way. I believed he might contain a pathology of the mind--an emptiness--a knocking hollow where his soul should have been. But I also knew that one day, I would grow up. One day, I would be twenty, or thirty, or forty, even fifty and sixty and seventy and eighty and maybe even one hundred years old. And all those years were mine, they belonged to nobody but me. So even if I was unhappy now, it could all change tomorrow. Maybe I didn't even need to jump off the cliff to experience that kind of freedom. Maybe the fact that I knew such a freedom existed in the world meant that I could someday find it. Maybe, I thought, I don't need a father to be happy. Maybe, what you get from a father you can get somewhere else, from somebody else, later. Or maybe you can just work around what's missing, build the house of your life over the hole that is there and always will be.

I love you," she said, and I knew she meant it because she spoke the words from the heart at the center of her chest. This, at least, had not been left behind at the hospital.

While I liked hamsters, too, the Habitrail cage was expensive. Even I could see that the interconnecting boxes, tubes, and spheres could easily bankrupt a family and lead to addiction later in life. Because, how would you know when to stop? How could you stop? An entire city could be built with a Habitrail.

It was like living in a new house. I saw the undersides of tables, walked through the tangle of chair legs. It would be good to be a dog, I thought. You would feel safe surrounded by all of these leggy objects that never tried to run away.

I saw a monkey walking on a leash and thought it was an ugly foreign child.

It terrified me to consider: What if, as a grown-up, I craved another body beside me as still as this one? What then?

I walked up to the house, rubbing my shoulder where it still hurt from the rifle's recoil. But soon, it wouldn't hurt because I would get used to it. It was amazing to me, what a person could get used to.

I paused finally and watched the trees for slashes of light, but saw none. As my heart settled and my ears became less occupied I listened and heard nothing but the thready pulse of the night. And I sensed that the hunt was over. I'd been prey and now I was not. Prey knows this. Prey knows when it has escaped.

Augusten very distant tonight. Probably because of my games.

Riding back from the grocery store, I realized my father was two men—one he presented to the outside world, and one, far darker, that was always there, behind the face everybody else saw. In my bedroom late that

How could something have no end, and if it had no end exactly where did it leave us?

We were alone together, we were an us.

My worth depended on where exactly the decimal was placed among the zeroes.

I slipped on a turtleneck, laughing when my head became stuck in the turtle part. If they weren't called turtlenecks, I wouldn't have worn them.

I nodded again, but I knew I would not grow up to drive a bulldozer. It would be awful to be dirty all day like these men. I didn't say it, but at best I would keep one in the backyard, like a goat.

I was desperate to show him what I could do on my own. But my father, because he hadn't been there, simply didn't believe what I was actually capable of accomplishing.

Speaking the words aloud so they would exist in the world and begin to become real.

People believe in god because they can't think to be alone.

If i wasn't an accident mustn't I be a crushing disappointment?

Where there is nothing, absolutely anything is possible.

How can you really miss something when you never experienced it?

I could see jabs from his flashlight cutting into the woods on either side of me. He was back there, somewhere. The light beam was like a knife and I didn't want it on my back.

Didn’t every new thing you did become a part of you, one of your bricks?

I made very good money and spent all of it every week. I lived paycheck to paycheck...

My goal was to get through the day as fast as possible. I worked fast because I wanted to be done. I wanted to be done because I wanted to go home to my nest and drink.