I Hold a Wolf by the Ears: Stories

The big alone," he said. "That's all any of us has in the end. Nothing can protect us from it, not careers or children or spouses or money or lovers.

She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.

Intimacy could distort one's vantage, that much was true. Sometimes trying to see the whole of a person could be like describing a painting with your nose pressed to the canvas, though my husband would have argued that I hadn't wanted to see from a different angle, hadn't wanted to step back.

All this disappointment was, I felt, intensified by the terrible movements in our world. There has never been a worse time to be a bystander, to be the person who says, That was taken out of context, or, There are always two sides, or, We don't yet know the whole story.

I wondered if God found people like me annoying, those who turned to prayer only when they were neck-deep, that terrible friend we've all had.

She was always telling people to shut the fuck up. It was a term of endearment.

...this is the problem with translating experience into fiction, the way certain truths read like lies.

I have learned that one must be very careful about the desperate wishes cast out into the ether because perhaps someone is listening, someone all too willing to grant us exactly what we have asked for and maybe even what we deserve.

My sister went in first. Pat followed. The moon dropped a net of light over the water, and I watched his high white ass disappear into the bay. Earlier I tried to explain to my sister how life felt like circling a giant dome, knocking and knocking on the smooth shell, searching for the door. Real life was happening in there, I was sure -- if only I could find my way inside.

There are people who defuse and people who detonate, people who make a mistake and instead of fixing it say: watch me be worse than you could have ever imagined. I put my elbows on the table. I smiled with my teeth.

Margot has always wanted to be the kind of person who can become too distraught to eat, but the truth is funerals make her hungry.

Margot suspects Sam has never understood her chronic unease, her relationship to difficulty--he who can drink all night with louche grace and never wind up sobbing at the dinner table or vomiting in the guest bed. He who thinks changing your life is as simple as, well, changing your life.

I was an attentive child; the world seemed like a bewildering place and I wanted all the knowledge I could come by.

This is the problem with the gig economy, I think as I squirm around in the trunk. Everyone is so vulnerable and the rules for what constitutes civilized behavior--well, they're coming apart so quickly I've decided those rules were illusions all along. We have stopped seeing each other as people, as fellow travelers on this dying earth; we just see a gig or an economy.... The system is designed to keep us so depleted that we forget our sense of decency and become so mercenary about our own survival that we have nothing left to contribute to the common good.

I was raised in the desert and always appreciated the way its landscape gives you a chance to see what's coming. In Florida, dangers don't reveal themselves until it's too late. The alligator lurking in the shallow pond, ready to devour your pet or your child. The snake hidden in the underbrush. The riptide slicing across that postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that flourish in overheated lakes. Quicksand.

Often children's book illustrators were assumed to have kind and whimsical natures--a foolish expectation, for all the best children's literature, if anyone has been paying attention, hinges on betrayal, the heartlessness of nature, death.

The things that hadn't happened, the honors not bestowed, had never bothered me earlier in my career, when time felt like a field without a visible horizon--but now that dark line had appeared in the distance and the story I had always told myself about my own limitless prospects was breaking down; not yet was starting to feel more like not ever.

Remember that history is not only about what happened," the guide added, "but also about what those in power want you to think happened.

What's one small thing you could do today to better your life?" I will ask a woman who calls the helpline one afternoon, picking from a list the workshop leader provided. "If I could answer that question do you really think I'd be calling this stupid number?" the woman will say back.