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It was like we were exchanging codes, on how to be a father and a daughter, like we'd read about it in a manual, translated from another language, and were doing our best with what we could understand.

Aimee Bender

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Aimee Bender
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: June 28
Novelist
Writer
the United States of America
Read
Language
Codes
Understand
Exchanging
Father
Manual
Another
Manuals
Best
Translated
Like
Code
Daughter

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I don't think so, I don't agree. The most unbearable thing I think by far, she said, is hope.
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It seemed to happen in springs, the revealing of things.
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We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.
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We're all getting too smart. Our brains are just getting bigger and bigger, and the world dries up and dies when there's too much thought and not enough heart.
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I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.
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Light is good company, when alone I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.
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I didn’t mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.
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As a writer you ask yourself to dream while awake.
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I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.
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...a Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.
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But what I kept wondering about is this: that first second when she felt her skirt burning, what did she think? Before she knew it was candles, did she think she'd done it herself? With the amazing turns of her hips, and the warmth of the music inside her, did she believe, for even one glorious second, that her passion had arrived?
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