Song for more than one voice
In Paris I ride in an old elevator. It has no memory. We cannot argue.
A middle-aged woman sits naked on a bed. A man, equally naked, stands facing her. “Do you want to fuck me?” she asks, with some quizzicalness in her voice and some pleading.
With his phone plugged in, recharging, he felt at peace.
What we have against cigarettes is not that they cause cancer, but that they were sold to us by corporations that knew they caused cancer.
If you didn’t count his second marriage and a job that, in a moment of desperation, he had taken in Philadelphia, he had so far—knock on wood—avoided serious accidents.
Like a baseball player, her vision was unusually good, her hand-to-eye coordination advanced. But these things also come and go in the course of a year. To a batter the ball, when he is hot, seems as large as a grapefruit. For her, at times, even feminine curves seemed lacking in shape and character.
People do not like being stuck in traffic or cramped in airline seats, but they prefer such moments to much of the rest of their lives.
When spring finally arrives there is always that sunny day, some years it’s days of helpless sadness, wishing for others and wishing for oneself that the weather were not so nice.
Her hair was such a lovely red, it was hard to believe she was allowed to undress alone.
He was such a feminist, it did not bother him that the woman he lived with earned more than he did and paid the rent.
“My imagination has gotten ahead of my life,” she said.
Among the things they don’t tell you about class warfare: even if you lose battle after battle, the war goes on.
After her mastectomy, she had, to no one’s surprise, decided against implants.
In my hotel room, the television gets only twenty-two channels and still there’s nothing on.
He said, “What I have failed to do in my life must equal, more or less, what others have failed to do in theirs.”
Whatever autonomy he enjoyed, he owed not so much to his tattoo as to his bicycle.
Fiction writing is about how each of us may be unique in the history of the universe.
After all the years I put in eating the right foods, getting the right exercise, avoiding accidents and addictions, imagine my surprise when I realized what the word “mortality” means!
— William Eaton
William Eaton is the Editor of Zeteo. A collection of his essays, Surviving the Twenty-First Century, was published in 2015 by Serving House Books. A second volume is forthcoming—2017. That book is slated to include some of his drawings, including the one above (a.k.a. Half Hillary).
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