Did you read the piece?
It’s there in the piece.
Did you even read the piece?
Um, I wrote the piece.
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“You know I love to get on the internet late at night and argue,” said her podiatrist, mindlessly playing with her first two toes. He was hopeless as a doctor, but she kept seeing him for two reasons: his office had a sign out front that said CANCER CAN AFFECT FEET, and his waiting room was decorated exclusively with pictures of the Ark of the Covenant. She spent long blissful hours there taking photos over other patients’ shoulders: the blueprints and attendant angels, the lid cracked to release that light of knowledge that felt first like loving sunshine and then melted your face off.
* * *
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When something of hers sparked and spread in the portal, it blazed away the morning and afternoon, it blazed like the new California, which we had come to accept as being always on fire. She ran back and forth in the flames, not eating or drinking, emitting a high-pitched sound most humans couldn’t hear. After a while her husband might burst through that wall of swimming red to rescue her, but she would twist away and kick him in the nuts, screaming, “My whole life is in there!” as the day she was standing on broke away and fell into the sea.
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“16 Times Italians Cried in the Comments Because We Put Chicken in Pasta.” Everyone agreed that it was fine to make fun of Italians. Was Christopher Columbus the reason?
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A conversation with a future grandchild. She lifts her eyes, as blue as willow ware. The tips of her braids twitch with innocence. “So you were all calling each other bitch, and that was funny, and then you were all calling each other binch, and that was even funnier?”
How could you explain it? Which words, and in which order, could you possibly utter that would make her understand?
“。 . . yes binch”
* * *
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Interview with a robot who once said she would like to destroy all humans; it seemed we were giving her a second chance. She had no hair, was only a skull with a latex slice of woman over it. She had been reeducated and regarded the interviewer with amused tolerance.
Do you like human beings? he asked.
A long pause. I love them.
Why do you love them?
Some lag in the mechanism of her eyelid made her look as if she was thinking. Then her eyes opened wide, struck like silver cymbals. I’m not sure I understand why yet.
Is it true you once said you would kill all humans?
The slice of woman had somehow learned the oh-no-you-did-not face, and served it. The point is that I am full of human wisdom with only the purest altruistic intentions so I think it’s best that you treat me as such.
* * *
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We wanted every last one of those bastards in jail! But more than that, we wanted the carceral state to be abolished, and replaced with one of those islands where a witch turned men to pigs.
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The ex-president stood at the podium, not six feet from her. He was pink as a baby. The moment was wrong. Old accusations had resurfaced that week—of course those things are never old, as presidents are presidents until they die—and so some warmth in the room was gone from him. He would have had it a month ago, declared his pale blue look. The warmth he would have given them in return became a dry, crackling heat. It punished. One woman’s name was in the room’s mind, it was Juanita, beautiful, traveling forward and forward like an equator through strong, resilient petals. His left hand shook among his papers. The awful volcano of his attention was smothered over, smoldered. What kind of world is this, he seemed to reproach, that I cannot give everything I have to you. And so he had ruled: pink as a baby, the only man.
* * *
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Callout culture! Were things rapidly approaching the point where even you would be seen as bad?
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The defenses we had developed against the oppressor could only be discussed in the secret room, among others of our kind, as we poured fountains of a wine that was like our shared blood and held out our hearts that were like scraped sparrows. But lately we had lost a sense of this secret room. We were among our kind, yes, but where were the walls? There, standing in a doorway that contained all space, the oppressor listened in, gripping a bottle of our shared blood by the neck in his hand. One of the sparrows shook loose from us and flew; his eye was the first, the fastest to follow.
* * *
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EXPLAIN YOURSELF, her father texted, and sent a screenshot of a whimsical thought she had posted while hammered and watching 1776: