All the Anxious Girls on Earth by Zsuzsi Gartner

Author:Zsuzsi Gartner
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307481290
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1999-01-14T22:00:00+00:00

A feeling of continual exhaustion will descend like a musty furniture blanket in the second week. You will be tempted to fight back.

There used to be an empty lot behind your apartment building, a lovely wreck of a lot littered with exploded chunks of concrete laced with twisted rebar, big-headed purple thistles waving in the wind, the candy wrappers caught in their prickly leaves fluttering like hideous moths, discarded syringes poised like scorpions. The kind of place you would most certainly act out your post-apocalyptic fantasies if you were still a kid. Its a reminder of how the world, your world, would look if we all just stopped being so damn careful. Now someone has decided to build a house there and the activity makes mincemeat of your sleep. It sounds as if a small army is stapling the house together, instead of using proper, old-fashioned tools like hammers. Dull thuds you might be able to take, but this feels like Gene Kelly and his cartoon mice practicing on the ceiling of your frontal lobes.

Storm over to check it out, but not before first scrubbing the stalagmites of sleep off your bottom lashes and flattening your bangs with the moistened heel of your hand so you don’t look as deranged as you feel. “Why yes, ma am,” one of the guys says. “Yes, we are stapling it together.” And the workmen all hold their staple guns out towards you, as if they’re a firing squad and you’ve been convicted of stealing bread in a country with zero tolerance for bad behaviour.

Ask (in what you think is a queenly manner): “But how long will it last?”

“Oh, a good thirty years, give or take. These aren’t your ordinary staples,” one of the guys says.

You, of course, meant the noise.

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