Disaster

Erica Laszlo

“Our hips ground together, like the kind of teenagers I at least had never been. Scandalous people: she’d get pregnant, he’s had to work in a gas station the rest of his life. Of course they would, you couldn’t dance like this and not have a life of disaster. Dancing with him like this I was a girl with no prospects.”
- Spending, Mary Gordon

Most Dangerous Time

Juarez drug wars - Washington Post

“I’m not gonna lie to you. What I’m gonna tell you is this: You are all living in the most dangerous time of your life right now. If you make it to the age of 21, count yourself lucky. Because if drinking and driving doesn’t kill you, you’re lucky. If drugs don’t get you, you’re real lucky. If depression, over the lack of a sure future, over a broken heart, if that doesn’t get you, you’re lucky. Now, if you are unlucky, that’s when you meet me. And what I do is I have you strip naked and I lay you on a metal slab. My pathologist will cut open every organ in your body, and all you secrets are now open for the whole world to know.”
- Da Vinci’s Inquest

We Were Here,

Photographer Unknown

Now we disappear.

No Good

Brooklyn Street Art

"Milo realized, not for the first time, that he was no good at living."
- The Tourist, Olen Steinhaur

Death

Patricia Ariel

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."
- Bukowski

Dire

"Quentin was pretty sure that if he stood very still for a few seconds everything would snap back to normal. He wondered if he was undergoing some dire neurological event. He looked cautiously back over his shoulder."
- The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Dark Side of Everything

Chat Noir

"Finally, there was no way of getting around it; there was a wedding to attend, after all. A wedding where Maddy would once again be the sidekick, the bad little sister who couldn't follow rules, who even as a grown woman was afraid of ridiculous things, thunderstorms and mice, traffic jams and airplanes. She would most likely be made to wear a horrible dress of some dreadful synthetic fabric while her sister glowed in white silk and satin. Second-rate, second-best, the dark side of everything. She never believed men who told her she was beautiful and shies away from friendships. She did her work and kept to herself, the sort of woman who could stand idly by while children removed a butterfly's wings or buried a toad in the mud."
- The Third Angel, Alice Hoffman

I Must Hear You

Artist Unknown

we stab ourselves
i must hear You
we stab
cutting the flaps of skin
the words twisting out, piling up onto the floor of our homes
they mix in the sounds of our blood
they drown
but it does not stop
we hear the same songs in the stomachs of others
so we grab more knives to cut them out
i must hear you
we grab more knives, but there are more and more stomachs
- Anis Mojgani

Blood, Panic, Sorrow

Caryn Drexl

"I had just wanted to get my point across. What was so wrong about that? There it was, every bit of who I was: blood, panic, sorrow. Did I have to spell it out for him?"
- The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

Ultrapostmodern

"So it's true," Julian said. "You really don't talk."
I nodded again.
"That is so fucking cool. Talk about meta. It's just transcendent."
- The Lock Artist, Steve Hamilton

Betrayed

Photographer Unknown

“You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.”
- The Ice Queen, Alice Hoffman

The Dark

Alex Prager

Maybe when I die

I get to be a car

Driving in the night

Lighting up the dark

- Land of Talk