Alissa Nutting

I was

slightly taller than Evan in a way that made me feel half-god to his mortal: every time we made out I had to bend down to reach his lips.

finding brief solace from my sexual frustrations in texts depicting ancient battles of

fervent bloodshed.

It made me think of the ice cream punch served at junior high school dances.

my whole body yearned

Their urges would grow up right alongside them like a shadow. They’d never feel their

libido a deformed thing to be kept chained up in the attic of their mind and to only be fed in secret after dark.

I wanted to remind

him that desire was only human but figured that was probably just what he’d expect the devil to say.

was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age. After a certain point, any detail, like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle, that implied youth simply looked ridiculous.

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart.

Went batty. Some parent was complaining that her son found the lectures in his class to be unintelligible. Gary just began screaming. Asked the mother if she was aware that her son had drawn an illustration of a hairy boner on his mitosis-video response worksheet.

“But Gary didn’t stop there. He lit up a Bunsen burner and began stripping. Set his tie and shirt on fire, then his pants. Parents ran from the room screaming. By the time the cops came, Gary had turned out the lights in his classroom and put on an old-school filmstrip about the atom bomb. He was sitting in one of the student d