“under house lights you move / through hallways backstage like it’s a sin / to inhabit your own skin”

“Sick, in these days, means alone.”

I’m no good at masturbating. For me, sex has always been about two, of the hunt or being hunted, of being desired, of falling headfirst into the abyss of the other.

On the train back to Grand Central, the city itself did not feel enough for me. I longed for the presence of another human being—a person I can touch, feel, and shelter with—to save me from the coming isolation of the second wave.

For Mary South, nurturing is just another way for people to connect, an effort her characters rarely accomplish. These stories focus so intently on the space between people that one could forget anyone ever succeeds in uniting.

I laugh too hard, for too long. Maybe owing to the fumes. Or perhaps owing to what my lawyer said. That this lawsuit could go for up to a year. Or longer even. 

The shape of violence lives invisibly inside of a woman. Now, the narrator is sharing a sliver of that burden with the perpetrator, and they are both wearing it, or are about to, publicly: she as the author; he, as a man with a pseudonym who has willingly submitted to being interviewed by the woman he wronged when she was a girl.”