“After ten years of a deepening political divide, of separation between those who leave and those who stay, of accelerating climate change (in 2012, we nearly burned to the ground; in 2017, Harvey flooded the town up to the central square)—the sense of despair had crept in until it overwhelmed the area like a bad smell. We had been the toughest of the tough, but nothing is invincible. Despair demands to be felt. I watch as we pass sign after sign. Vote no, vote no, vote no.”

“Dying is a vulnerable act. There’s rarely the serenity we see in deathbed scenes. Instead, the pragmatic, much of which we view as shameful: the slow loss of function, the bowels loosed in bed, the sweat stench, the tonguing mouth, the hallucinatory terror, the whimpers, the rattle. You spent all this time learning how not to trip over your own feet and here you are now — older than anyone else in the room and forced to use a stroller, swaddled in diapers. You revert to a time when your mother held you, only your mother is gone. Your children (if you remember them) don’t visit, and why is that?”

“Her friends were dying to see pictures. They hadn’t even seen a single one yet! They didn’t want to bother her, they said, because they knew this time could be difficult, taxing, made more so by lockdown. They would help if they could, of course they would, but they simply couldn’t leave their homes. But pictures, please. Pictures or it didn’t happen, they joked. What they didn’t say was that it was odd, how Sadie was so cagey about sending pictures, posting pictures, sharing this so withheld child. She’s protective, Sadie’s most preferred friend said. All mothers are protective. Another friend, Sadie’s worst friend, teased her. I bet this baby isn’t even real, she said. All the friends laughed with her. It was a joke; of course it was a joke! But the thought was out in the ether. There was a shift. Yes, they said. Pictures or it didn’t happen.”

“She created an account. Posts had to be accompanied by an “action,” (a description of the task or the user could select from a list of list of pre-existing actions—which wld u choose was one of the them, she noted), and a time stamp of when the “action” was completed. There was a box for price—the amount the user wanted to charge for views. Flat rates for images and priced per second for videos. You could tag a benefactor, i.e., the user who requested (the forum called it ”commissioning”) the content in the first place, or list it as a #reprint, where other users could purchase viewing rights for a fraction of the original cost. All money was sent to your account, less fifteen percent which the forum collected as a referral fee. If your benefactor rejected your content, you were even issued a kill fee. You owned all your content. You, and the forum.”

“The pandemic turned me into a compass without a needle. Any direction seemed plausible now. I’d always wanted to try my hand at self-employment. The entire nation was reexamining professional priorities. Why not me too? So I quit, off in search of new joy. This was a major miscalculation.”

“As time went on, she thought how nice it would be to be able to join him in those rooms. If she could step over that threshold—would she transform too? Would she be the younger Janie, the beautiful Janie, the Janie James married on day one? Would he see what she saw? Or would he see an old woman, one he didn’t recognize, or worse, mistook for his mother. It would be impossible to know the answer—the disease didn’t allow her to join him.”

“One week after it happened, a strange woman appeared in my apartment. I say appeared because that’s what she did—one day she was not there, the next day she was. I checked the locks on the door, the screens on the windows, everything still shut up safe. I ran my fingers over the seams of my closet, thinking perhaps that was how she got in. But everything was how one would expect it to be. Clothes that no longer fit. Shoes rarely if ever worn. Boxes full of mementos I know are important but can no longer remember why. Everything in all the hidden places was still hidden. Except that she was here now, and the oddest thing of all was that she seemed to belong here more than me.”

“The kitten demands to be fed. Never mind that her bowl is still full. (Always, without fail.) I still get up at 6 am every morning to re-fill it, even on weekends, even when I’m sick. I do this because she makes me. She makes me by standing on my chest and tapping my eyes with her paws, knock-knock, time to pay attention to me. I love her little paws. They are sweet and gentle and small. Sometimes I even kiss them. But this morning, she didn’t wake me. The habit did.”

“Years back drought came through and ravaged our land in a way we hadn’t seen before. A way we needed to get used to, old timers said. I went home to see for myself and what I found was whole prairies of brown, matchstick grass, claustrophobic heat and a whole lot of dead trees. Drooping, gnarled, their limbs like arms hung limp on a body just moments away from death. Trees on the gallows. One after the other, all of them lined up for execution. I stood in our field, feeling like I forgot something. The grass, despite its difficulties, still reached up to brush my arms like fingers trying to soothe, or a child tapping to remind me what was still there.”

“Not two weeks after Seth asked Jolie to marry him, a question she wanted to be asked so she could know her own answer (the answer was currently yes), Jolie received word that her mother died. The news came in a little white envelope mailed from Rio Medina where Jolie’s grandmother had lived. Mamaw died the year earlier, so Ruth Ann, the neighbor lady, must have sent it thinking she done a good conscience. Inside the envelope was a single gray newspaper cutout featuring a picture of Jolie’s mother from back when she could still be considered a mother. Obituary, it read. Jolie was listed as a surviving family member, along with some man who must have been the most recent husband. Her mother’s name, changed to match whoever this new husband was, was in black, bold letters over the top – Shauna Mertz Janek, 55.”

“When you don’t have money or a place to stay, but you do have an addiction, an abusive partner, or an exploitative job, you need to know where you can go. The church serves hot lunch on Mondays. The empty park behind the old Hardee’s is a good place to set up camp. The library will let you stay all day as long as you don’t sleep and you don’t have outbursts. Balance a book on your lap; if you’re gonna doze, make sure you doze sitting up. The librarians know who you are. The librarians see you.”