Emma Straub

It was so long ago now that the job felt like part of her soul. Like being a teacher or an artist who made things out of sand. You never really saw the results. You just trusted that you knew what you were doing and that everything would work out okay in the end.

Maybe that was the answer to good parenting__retending the first child was the second.

Why bother getting married, going through all the pomp and pageantry, if you didn't think it was going to last? It was far easier to live in sin and not have to deal with the paperwork.

So much for being a good friend was knowing when to keep your mouth shut.

Why couldn't everyone stay young forever? If not on the outside, then just on the inside, where no one ever got too old to be optimistic.

There was nothing in life harder or more important than agreeing every morning to stay the course, to go back to your forgotten self of so many years ago, and to make the same decision.

...all she wanted was a button she could push to pause her age, just for a little while, a few years, while she got used to the idea.

Elizabeth ran her finger along the windowsill, gathering dust. The view was almost exactly the same as from her own bedroom, only a few degrees shifted. She could still see the Rosens' place, with its red door and folding shutters, and the Martinez house, with its porch swing and the dog bowl. She'd heard once that what made you a real New Yorker was when you could remember back three laters -- the place on the corner that had been a bakery and then a barbershop before it was a cell-phone store, or the restaurant that had been Italian, then Mexican, then Cuban. The city was a palimpsest, a Mod Podged pileup or old signage and other people's failures. Newcomers saw only what was in front of them, but people who had been there long enough were always looking at two or three other places simultaneously. The IRT, Canal Jeans, the Limelight. So much of the city she'd fallen in love with was gone, but then again, that's how it worked. It was your job to remember. At least the bridges were still there. Some things were too heavy to take down.

She had the wild look of someone who hadn__ slept in twenty-four hours, with purplish semicircles underneath both her eyes. Being eighteen was like being made out of rubber and cocaine.

There was nothing about youth that was fair: the young hadn't done anything to deserve it, and the old hadn't done anything to drive it away.

Some people smoked crack in alleyways. Franny ate chocolate. On the scale of things, it seemed entirely reasonable.