Aimee Bender - The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake (2010)

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My eyelids are my own private cave, he murmured. That I can go to anytime I want.

Aimee Bender
I felt the crumpled paper that had taken the place of my lungs expand as if released from a fist.

Aimee Bender
That at the same time of this very intimate act of concentrating so carefully on the details of our mother's palm and fingertips, 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.

Aimee Bender
A Dorito asks nothing of you, which is its great gift. It only asks that you are not there.

Aimee Bender
Light is good company, when alone; I took my comfort where I found it, and the warmest yellow bulb in the living-room lamp had become a kind of radiant babysitter all its own.

Aimee Bender
I was with them for all of it, but more like an echo than a participant.

Aimee Bender
I was right at the edge of their circle, like the tail of a Q...

Aimee Bender
Mom loved my brother more. Not that she didn't love me - I felt the wash of her love every day, pouring over me, but it was a different kind, siphoned from a different, and tamer, body of water. I was her darling daughter; Joseph was her it.

Aimee Bender
I watched as she added a question mark at the end. Arc, line, space, dot.

Aimee Bender
We hit the sidewalk, and dropped hands. How I wished, right then, that the whole world was a street.

Aimee Bender
With my hand in his, I looked at all the apartment buildings with rushes of love, peering in the wide streetside windows that revealed living rooms painted in dark burgandies and matte reds.

Aimee Bender
Mom flipped through the magazines like the pages needed to be slapped.

Aimee Bender
Kissing George was a little like rolling in caramel after spending years surviving off rice sticks.

Aimee Bender
Sometimes, she said, mostly to herself, I feel I do not know my children... It was a fleeting statement, one I didn't think she'd hold on to; after all, she had birthed us alone, diapered and fed us, helped us with homework, kissed and hugged us, poured her love into us. That she might not actually know us seemed the humblest thing a mother could admit.

Aimee Bender
To see someone you love, in a bad setting, is one of the great barometers of gratitude.

Aimee Bender
I could feel the tears beginning to collect in my throat again, but I pushed them apart, away from each other. Tears are only a threat in groups.

Aimee Bender
Many kids, it seemed, would find out that their parents were flawed, messed-up people later in life, and I didn't appreciate getting to know it all so strong and early.

Aimee Bender
I didn't mind the quiet stretches. It was like we were trying out the idea of being side by side.

Aimee Bender