“The only ones we never killed were the wall geckos. Armed with nothing but silence, the hopeful geckos slithered across the empty spot, across the walls, only searching for their way to the roof.”

“As a witness at the door of your parents’ room, you learned every argument is a circling around the same unnamed problem. A raised voice is a shunned voice is a measured voice.”

“Being alive, she thought, just being alive and a woman was enough to make her vengeful protagonist behave as she did. Ruth didn’t need to dial it up. She didn’t need to change a word.”

“Up here he no longer needed to hide his voice.”

“I tried putting myself in Mert’s shoes—I was in his underwear after all—and wondered at how easily he had offered me something so intimate. Realizing that all my efforts had been so transparent, that I had no protective cover whatsoever, was like being shoved into cold water again and again.”

You’ve never been a woman. You’ve been inside a woman, but you’ve never been a woman with something inside of her. You are inside of me. You marvel at the shape of my bladder.