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Alexandra Kleeman Books

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“There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation.”

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“The structural similarity of men, and their ability to be represented both as ideal, like Leonardo's Vitruvian Man, and as average. Man being the measure of all things, and therefore a sort of standard and interchangeable unit of length, breadth, intelligence, emotion. We could lay them end to end to measure the distance between the continents, the distance to the moon. We could use them to calculate the weight of weather, or to buy things at the grocery. With such an abundance of men, we could gauge anything we chose.”

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“She felt sad, but she hadn't cried all day. She thought that crying would actually be a good thing right now. It seemed normal to react. Whoever Martin had been, he had probably been a normal person. He was probably having a normal reaction right now, and she had caused it. She felt bad for confusing him. She thought it might be fair to cry for him. But it wasn’t until she thought of the mother cows in the pasture the day after the weaning, wandering around singly in the naked sunshine, still trying to call out in their hoarse, broken voices for the young ones that were still missing, that she was finally able to make herself cry—a little bit for all of the calves, but mostly for herself.”

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“Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative.”

LifeBeautifulNatureAnimalsEndingDescriptiveFood ChainLast LinesAlexandra KleemanThe Circle Of Life
Book:You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
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“I left the room before I could figure out exactly what bothered me about his response. Was it the way it seemed to assume a future for the two of us? A future in which I would continue to be unable to leave this house? Was it the presumption that I was making a cake for him when, really, I had no idea why I was making a cake at all?”

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“I didn't know what to say. I knew I had a big choice to make. I could let it all go and try to love him, try to trust him, try to make something lasting and good. He obviously had strong feelings for me or about me. And he wasn't being so bad right now. We could build something sturdy, beautiful. Or I could try to make a dash for the door by crawling under the dining room table. There was a good chance that he would kill me later either way.”

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“I got up to go back to the kitchen and put the cake in the oven. Probably it would not go well for the cake, or for whoever tried to eat the cake. It did not look as though the cake was going to turn out particularly nice, having been made for confusing reasons and lacking certain essential ingredients. But what else was there to do? Wasn't a terrible cake better than some terrible cake batter?”

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“But there was a feeling building in me now that I hadn't felt since I'd shown up at this stupid party: I was excited. Something was going to happen. Either this would work, or it wouldn't. Either I would be spared, or I would die. Either death was something that could be fooled, outwitted, outplayed, or it was not. However things ended, I would learn something about the world in which, for the moment, I continued to live.”

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“You have beautiful eyes, he said all of a sudden. I hated compliments like that, compliments that carved out one particular part of your body and put it on a platter for viewing. It always took a while for me to reabsorb that body part afterward, to add it back to the whole. The best kind of compliment to give me was something vague, plausible. You’re all right. Or, Don’t worry, it gets better.”

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“So full. Full of lobster meat and the sadness of the lobster meat. Full of the feeling of having cracked hundreds upon hundreds of precious shells. Full of the sound and the sight of destruction, the lobsters dead in a pile, some of them with lipstick marks on their empty husks. Their voices piled up on one another. I felt a whispering coming from deep within my belly, the voices not yet at rest, and they said in a tone sympathetic and unsympathetic at the same time, Next Next Next. 'Well,' I said, 'what do we do next?' 'Lobster dinner?' he asked, chuckling a little as if I ought to be chuckling with him as well.”

SadnessHorrorDisturbingCreepyFullAlexandra KleemanIntimationsLobstersLobster Dinner
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“I remembered from movies and TV that a human being striking a window could cause it to shatter, but the glass was too strong or I was too weak. My body didn't do much anymore when I put it to things. I didn't even make much noise pounding my fist against the glass: the ones that turned to look dismissed me almost before they had swiveled their heads. I might have been a painting of a hysterical female, paused in motion and screaming decoratively. But my throat was going raw, and my hands hurt dully.”

DescriptionAlexandra KleemanHysterical Female
Book:You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
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