As they headed back into town in Smiley’s pickup, she could only feel like they had all done something wrong, something to be ashamed of. Something they could never talk about again.

The house had a pointed, skinny frame, like a too-tall man. It was a pus-yellow clapboard, perverse against the snow. “Perfect,” Celia said...

standing shoulder to shoulder / staring at a painting of a massacre / from which the sufferers [had] been replaced / to center the camouflage of negative space / that binds suffering to celestiality

& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump