Flight Behavior

Words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

The arguments she’d always swallowed like a daily ration of pebbles had begun coming into her mouth and leaping out like frogs.

Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,” he said. “We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.”

Diapause,” he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice.
Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general

Dellarobia studied the toy—bulky body, cord, receiver, dial—and realized it did not resemble any telephone that existed in Cordelia’s lifetime. Phones lived in people’s pockets, they slid open, they certainly had no dials.
“Why would she talk into it? She doesn’t know it’s a telephone.”
Hester wouldn’t get this, of course. In her eyes it was a phone, and that was that. Dellarobia could barely get it herself. She’d seen something so plainly in this toy that was fully invisible to her child, two realities existing side by side. It floored her to be one of the people seeing the world as it used to be. While the kids shoved on.

Measure of a Man
A certain feeling comes from throwing your good life away, and it is one part rapture. Or so it seemed for now, to a woman with flame-colored hair who marched uphill to meet her demise. Innocence was no part of this. She knew her own recklessness and marveled, really, at how one hard little flint of thrill could outweigh the pillowy, suffocating aftermath of a long disgrace. The shame and loss would infect her children too, that was the worst of it, in a town where everyone knew them. Even the teenage cashiers