It was oddly quiet, and the air had a strangely urgent quality. The sun came out, and water on the leaves and branches turned oaks and aspens into Christmas trees.

Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,

The effort involved in making my chocolate chip cookies, do you know? They're not easy. No. Not easy.

She sets the muffins aside, opens herself, nymph-like, mouth spread and gritty. She pulls the dirty edge of his gray t-shirt up so to show herself to him, spreads herself across the mattress like thin flesh oil over too much canvas....

Poor, pocked Ceres- dwarf planet/ trapped among mere asteroids-

The steady sound of shoveling for the past three hours would have woken her, should have made her come to the window...

I'm still working on this. I'm always open to your thoughts.

In one of the cartoons I watched as a child, Popeye the Sailor gives Olive Oyl a bouquet of flowers. She is thrilled, he walks on air, thinking they will marry. His one-eyed heroism is soon challenged by Bluto however, who pours cement into Popeye's bath. It goes…

No jagged bits of crust were thrust up/ through the prairie’s black gumbo/ to give us cataclysmic mountain views.

The universe will fuck you over in the end./ That’s what it does, what it’s good at—

Dread and drudgery sour each day

Effluvium is such a lovely word, so hey surprise it covers rancid butter, vomit, fertile gingko fruit trekked in from the pavement.

...

...lotus roots carved with clunky holes like a mouse’s drawing of Swiss cheese.

heart-shaped stones love, devotion no way