Fiction of the Day
Ugly Girl
By Joyce Carol Oates
I wasn’t born ugly. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler. Beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile.
I wasn’t born ugly. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler. Beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile.
It was something. Out of nowhere, I didn’t give a shit about anything for like a month. Like nothing.
I was standing on the slick concrete floor of the barn hall, smoking a cigarette, waiting for Clement. It was four-thirty in the morning, and the dew on the roadside grass leading to the barn sparkled in the moonlight.
On the edge of the leaf a line of light, of yellow light born over the green escaped over the side catch it with a finger and then a hand he brought it up to his eye and put it through, bouncing on the ground the uneven road cracked the direction and he followed into the garden transparent and shiny to the sun.
Was that the moon? None of my business. And anyway I’m myopic. Third grade. I remember. Things growing dim. Chalk lines fading like runic characters. The fluorescence. My classmates’ faces glowing,
As she enters, it all but caresses her, the oval mirror, the luminous, tightly drawn curtains, and her shadow, an anonymous lady-in-waiting who brushes the snow from her heartshaped fur collar.
“Listen,” Trudy Kay had Ettie Savage on the telephone and she was breathing somewhat more forcefully than normal. “About your living room. You’ll remember I was talking to you the other day. I want you to know
For what our friend Madame de Rocattefours, herself gaining all simplicities with age, calculated to be almost a month, the cat had been languishing; as the days flooded with spring and nervously passed it took pleasure in sitting to watch the light stream through the bank of laced windows, its nostrils flaring and acquiescing.
There is much to say about soap. Precisely every thing that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.
There is much to say about soap. Precisely every thing that it tells about itself until the complete disappearance, the exhaustion of the subject. This is just the object suited to me.
It was Saturday afternoon, and my wife and I decided to go to the mall to pick up a pair of pants I’d bought there and had altered. We couldn’t find a parking space outside so we drove into one of those