The Family Fang

Even awful people can be polite for a few minutes,” their father told them. “Any longer than that and they revert to the bastards they really are.

What you'll find, I think, is that the things you most want to avoid are the things that make you feel the greatest when you actually do them.

He tried to think of all the people in his life as chemicals, the uncertainty of mixing them together, the potential for explosions and scarring.

Conventional lives are the perfect refuge if you are a terrible artist.

The simplest things are the hardest to understand.

What do you think I'm going to do?" she asked him. "Whatever it is," he answered, "I think you'll be terrified when it happens. Don't let that stop you.

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

Was this how trauma worked? she wondered. Those closest to it remained dumbfounded by the fact that those who weren't present could derive meaning from it?

When she called her brother, Buster said that she should climb out the window of the bathroom and run away, which was his solution to most problems.

His writing had become, like a stash of rare and troubling pornography, something that must be kept hidden, an obsession that other people would be mystified to discover.

That does not surprise me,' Annie said and once again hung up the phone thinking that she had chosen to surround herself with people who were, for lack of a better term, retarded.

You are very sweet," she told him after a year of dating, as they shared dessert at a restaurant, "but it's like your family trained you to react to the world in a way that was so specific to their art that you don't know how to interact with people in the real world. You act like every conversation is just a buildup to something awful.

It was hard to see where he was going, and he was careful not to damage the camera, so expensive that his father made him name it (Carl), so he would treat it more carefully.

Wyoming, to Annie, was represented by a blank, bleak space in her imagination. It was a place she could hide. The worst that could happen would be that she would sleep with Daniel and then get eaten by a wolf. She could live with that.

But do you enjoy it?” Annie asked. Raven stared at Annie’s reflection in the mirror. “I don’t hate it,” Raven said. “You spend enough time with anything, that’s all you can really ask for.

It had all been fake, a choreographed event, but they could not escape the dread that rattled inside their chests. It was a testament to their proficiency and talent as artists. They had affected themselves with the authenticity of the moment.

Annie took another sip of the vodka, letting the alcohol seep through her system, turning bad ideas into good ones.

I understand that art is a necessary component of a civilized society, but you cannot just go around shooting people. That's going to be a problem.

Again,' he said and, without waiting for an answer, ran into the growing dark without fear, every single part of his body overwhelmed with the task of being alive.

I know why you picked that movie,' he told her. Annie smiled and said, 'It fits our life in a few ways, I guess.' Buster pointed at the screen, which was now blank. 'It shows you that you have to stay vigilant to find a missing person, even when people tell you not to, that it's possible to bring them back from the dead.' Annie shook her head. 'I picked it because it shows that after you bring someone back from the dead, you get to kill them yourself.

People would call him Professor Fang, which sounded so much like a super villain that he wasn't sure he could go through with it.

Children are not guaranteed the luxuries of family, Ms. Wells," he said. "If people are unable to exist within the parameters that have been created for them, they lose any claim to titles like son and daughter.

Annie, no stranger to disappointment, felt the hope break down inside her body and disperse without any lingering effects.

Buster was not used to this experience, physical desire that was actually fulfilled. In his entire life, he had kissed five women. One of them had been his sister. This was, Buster understood, a terrible percentage. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd had sex and still have enough fingers left over to make complicated shadow puppets.

Buster closed his eyes, held his breath, and, before he realized that the gun had been fired, a gust of heat and wind passed over him and deconstructed the beer can atop his head, the sound of something irrevocably giving up its shape and becoming, in an instant, something new.

He felt certain that he was a failure, every artistic endeavor ending with his own surprise at how little had come from it. Perhaps that was how life worked, the expectation of success after each failure the engine that kept the world turning. Perhaps retrogression was an artistic endeavor in itself. Perhaps he might sink so far that he would find himself, somehow, returned to the surface.

Great art is difficult," Caleb said. After a few moments, he said, "But I don't understand why it has to be so difficult sometimes.

He would teach himself to dislike what he actually liked, to approve of what he did not totally understand, in the hopes that he would come out the other side with something that resembled inspiration, something that would make him more famous than Chris Burden or even Hobart Waxman.

They stood, a family, and walked out of the mall, into the sunlight, seeking to rearrange the shape of their surroundings, to blow something up and watch all the tiny pieces resettle around them like falling snow.

Buster sat on the curb in front of the college, waiting for his sister to pick him up. To pass the time, he skimmed the stories of the creative writing students. One was about a wild party and the story consisted almost entirely of a detailed explanation of a drinking game called Flip 'N Chug that seemed, to Buster, to be too complicated to facilitate the simple goal of getting drunk.