Lorrie Moore - "Birds of America"

Only just started, but already amazing sentences.

The story "Community life".



    She looked at him darkly. "What the hell were you thinking of, recommending that stock?" she asked. "How could you be such an irresponsible idiot?" She saw it now, how their life would be together. She would yell; then he would yell. He would have an affair; then she would have an affair. And then they would be gone and gone, and they would live in that gone.



    They stopped briefly at an English manor house, to see the natural world cut up into moldings and rugs, wool and wood captive and squared, the earth stolen and embalmed and shellacked.



    No one had toasted Abby and Bob at their little wedding, and that's what had been wrong, she believed now. No toast. There had been only thirty guests and they had simply eaten the ham canapes and gone home. How could a marriage go right? It wasn't that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.



    "Gee, I thought you guys would never break up!" he says in a genuinely flabbergasted tone.
    "Really?" I find this reassuring somehow, that my relationship at least looked good from the outside, at least to someone.
    "Well, not really," admits Cal. "Actually, I thought you guys would break up long ago."
    "Oh," I say.
    "So you could marry her?" says the amazing Eugene to this father, and we all laugh loudly, pour more wine into glasses, and hide our faces in them.



    She had, without realizing it at the time, learned to follow Nick's gaze, learned to learn his lust, and when she did go out, to work at least, his desires remained memorized within her. She looked at the attractive women he would look at. She turned to inspect the face of every pageboy haircut she saw from behind and passed in her car. She looked at them furtively or squarely - it didn't matter. She appraised their eyes and mouths and wondered about their bodies. She had become hi: she longed for those women. But she was also herself, and so she despised them. She lusted after them, but she also wanted to beat them up.
    A rapist.
    She had become a rapist, driving to work in a car.
    But for a while, it was the only way she could be.
    She began to wear his clothes - a shirt, a pair of socks - to keep him next to her, to try to understand why had done what he'd done. And in this new empathy, in this pants role, like an opera, she thought she understood what it was to make love to a woman, to open the hidden underside of her, like secret food, to thrust yourself up in her, her arch and thrash, like a puppet, to watch her later when she got up and walked around without you, oblivious to the injury you'd surely done her. How could you not love her, gratefully, marveling? She was so mysterious, so recovered, an unshared thought enlivening her eyes; you wanted to follow her forever.
    A man in love. That was a man in love. So different from a woman.




    She went home, poured herself a drink, stood by the mantel. She picked up the pink-posied tin and shook it, afraid she might hear the muffled banging of bones, but she heard nothing. "Are you sure it's even him?" Jack asked. "With animals, they probably do mass incinerations. One scoop for cats, two for dogs."

Deru - "Torn In Two"

When life is fucked up, and Deru turns out to have a new album, life is slightly less fucked up.