34 Quotes by Monica Drake

The Arboretum’s overgrown grass rustled. The branches of an apple tree shook as though an animal had jumped from one to the next. A wind slid up my thighs, in the night, under my short nightgown. Crickets and cicadas made a sound like distant laughing children, the laugh track to a sitcom that didn’t end. It was like the grass was full of tiny giggling babies. So beautiful, and creepy.

I watched the moon through the window. It was a beautiful, floating illusion of a still point in the universe. Dark shadows passed over the plains, mountains and water.

You will be my favorite ex,” I whispered in his ear. “I’ll be your fifth former wife. We’ll mutter crazy dreams together then apart, but you will always be with me.” His breath was warm and so very human, not demonic at all. He said, “Don’t break my nose.” I said, “I won’t even break your heart.

Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.

We’re mourning and celebrating at the same time, so drink.

When I stand around all day, into the afternoon, I start to feel like a good bike pulled to the curb. I’m every car that’s ever idled, a motorcycle gulping its own exhaust, lurching toward open road. I’m paid to stand, and I get this feeling my body is waiting for my mind to figure out what I’m supposed to do with being alive.

Playing Frisbee gave Sean permission to look at Lu, across a short distance. He didn’t have to feel stupid for staring.

Where we grew up, we didn’t learn how to live. We learned how to bury the land, seal life off. There was an unacknowledged backdrop to being a kid on land that was fast turning into strip malls, when you loved trees and a silent corporate presence kept showing up to knock the trees down. It was the helpless sense that everything you ever loved could be destroyed, without debate.

And she thought, Who the hell are you, Mister? But his eyes were blue and his hair was thick, and his arms were strong and sinewy. He had a Nevada tan, desert tan, wherever he’d been living, wherever he sometimes went. He was gorgeous, that hothead. She put an orange segment in her mouth, held it out toward his mouth, leaned in, rolled on top of him, her body over his, and he bit into the orange, gulped it even, made his mouth ready for more, for her, like he’d been starving.