Diane Williams - Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty

As a courtesy, to some extent, Mrs. Oh kept her cell phone conversation brief and her voice low.

Mr. Oh sat unspeaking in an aimless, I mean, armless chair. He was less husky than I would have expected — composed, nonetheless, of curving segments. Then, as if by the flip of a lever, he fell from his chair.

Others jumped around.

Strangest of all, whoever enters Carnegie Nail is exempted from the bitterness of experience.

Oh, Mr. Oh found his way back up to good effect while Mimi supported the shop’s potted, toppled plant.

The damp day got me as I left, but I did not publicly condemn it.

At home Wanda appeared with our infant and the infant’s father — my husband — was seated in a chair that’s sufficient to defend itself.

My next step surely was clear, for life presents the flowers of life. We’d been viewing the infant as if it’d been wrenched off a tree branch or a weedy stem.

But the question is much more complex. A child needs to be cut down to its lowest point compatible with survival.

I have this violent reaction to Margot Alphonse.

“Perhaps you’ll get treated,” she had said, “and then you won’t have blood all over your hands.”

In any event, Margot cancelled her appearance in this story. She had loved me, possibly… bathed me in the bathroom. We slept with a window open — on a pretty courtyard — where you can still hear the people who often need to significantly yell on the avenue.

On the improvement of my understanding of her and overall, I feel the variety of emotions.

Her voice is heavy. I had intended to lift it, to hold it, so it wouldn’t feel as if it was pulling at my neck.

My ethical standards are high.

“What shall we do now?” Margot asked. “I am returning your property.”

“No. No, you don’t, Margot.”

She opened up her handbag and handed me my stonewalls, it felt like.

My friend said, “I fell in love with the neighbor.”

I said, “Your husband fell in love with the neighbor?”

My friend said, “No!” She said, “ I fell in love with the neighbor!”

She was counting her fingers. She said she couldn’t get the neighbor’s penis to do anything.

As a matter of fact, I couldn’t get his penis to do anything either. It hung like a mop or it had a life of its own. How it came up in the first place, I don’t know. He couldn’t get my vagina — I wanted to say — to utter a word.

But since one should always make room for fun, we all ate food and we laughed.

The last time I saw my friend was when she was finishing her drink, gulping. Was it like the sound of the sea perhaps? — how the sea very slowly and with great effort laps but does not go down — I want to say — in one gulp.

The last time I saw my friend’s crêpe de chine skin, her frizzy hair — her dark breasts that wriggle raw, I said to myself, “You had enough?”

He had just seen a rodent with such expressive eyes and he knows horses intimately, too. He carves horses and he paints a whole group on their points of hips, the throatlatches, on the tails, and so forth.

His daughter and his daughter’s friend have stopped by briefly.

If left to themselves, they fight like fiends or yell out the great news and one of these girls is entirely out of danger.

The daughter hates her father and she says, “Dad, sorry, but you should keep trying me—”

He knows a horse seems to be laboring when its legs are drawn up under it — he knows that.

His daughter has a terrified pair of eyes.

A Delta Airlines employee arrives to deliver his lost piece of luggage.

The father blushes — congratulates himself for getting so much attention, is so stimulated, and ever since has felt irremediably shy when sexual subjects are discussed.

So, I’ve got good news, but I also felt so bad I was crying.

She’s so wrongly old and I’m her daughter, but can she still have children?

Now I have a baby boy and a five-year-old girl.

Being married, I thought I’d always be married to Wayne because he tried to be perfect. What more could he ask for?

They don’t need to get me more belts. I have enough belts. I like the fringe.

This is to commemorate personal tastes — mine — the Durrants’. The Durrants are still here.

Mrs. Durrant asks Gabor Mavor what she wants and Gabor says, “A watch.”

I wish I had Gabor’s health and safety.

However, I am encouraged by the spirit of invention. A man I see through the plate glass shovels a lot of snow and he doesn’t even have a shovel! He has one of those little brush scrapers on a stick.

A man like this has self-confidence.

Often life deals severely with me, and yet I’ll be wearing my nose.

There’s a cloth to wipe clear her muscular organ with the foam or the scum on it. People were talking too loudly. “You can’t tell grown up people what to do,” someone said. One person had fever, pain in the abdomen that develops normally like a sixth sense, and he wasn’t careful choosing a marriage partner. He is noted for his humor and his favorite color is dark purple.

The physician covering him called him to report: “I find myself shocked and deeply hurt by your condition.”

Her fate was being rigged for the rough surface. Nothing was omitted from her desirable world insofar as she likes Mr. Keable and other men in suits with short hair; patient service staff who smile; all the people with large, accurate vocabularies; big blossoms; logical arguments.

If a poached egg, open and bleeding, could give us the color palette, let us color her home in with that.

In the evening, Mrs. Keable’s brothers, arriving in a black Volkswagen, often visited. She had in the past been scared to death of them.

As the sun comes up, it’s as if, for Mrs. Keable, there’s a slice of lime on any serving of her food.

See how the kitchen spray looks when it’s turned into words? — white or buff and gray.

The daughter leant over a hope chest to confirm the location of the electrical outlet.

It doesn’t make my life worse to say that the mother seems to enjoy herself and that the daughter is fine. The previous autumn there’d been difficulties. The daughter fled and did not plan to return. The grave of the woman’s husband had been recently dug.

The daughter’s dead now.

The mother poured herself a cup of coffee and studied the meniscus and I sized it up, too.

I tried to see how I could run off into my own words.

Don’t hurt me!

I’m smart, I think, and I am always up for fun and games — jokes. So this is suitable for certain people. One day the police found me in a pile of snow and I said I don’t want to live anymore. Mother gave me a hot drink, a bath, washed my clothes, and ironed them. We had a long talk — she saved my life. I was going to find another snowdrift.

This morning I walked toward a tree. A woman at a distance was standing in the snow, crying, “Melba! Melba!” That’s what I thought.

“Do you want me to get her for you?” I called. I called again and I called again to the woman just to make sure.