He was also removing all traces of any tiny leftover parts, and suddenly a ritual which I’d always found incestuous and gross seemed to me more like a desperate act on Joseph’s part to get out, to leave, to extract every little last remnant and bring it into open air.
As soon as you laugh from nerves or make a joke or say something just to say something or get all involved with the bushes, then you blow open a window in your house of desire and it can’t heat up as well. Cold draft comes in.
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.
The stories themselves haunt, they stick around, they linger, inhabiting a little corner of the reader’s brain and resurfacing to evoke mystery or sadness or longing.
Listen. Look. Desire is a house. Desire needs closed space. Desire runs out of doors or windows, or slats or pinpricks, it can’t fit under the sky, too large. Close the doors. Close the windows.
