Vocabulary from "Americca" by Aimee Bender

We all shrugged in unison.

This incident would’ve been filed away in non-memory and we would just have had clean teeth for longer, except that in the morning there was a new knick-knack on the living room side table, a slim abstract circle made of silver, and no one had any idea where it came from.

This is far too bourgeois for me, she said.

We’ve been backwards robbed, she said solemnly.

Like… silver meets turquoise, he said, laughing.

Although getting robbed would be bad, there was nothing appealing about getting more items every day, and I felt a vague sense of claustrophobia pick up in my lungs, like I might get smothered under extra throw pillows in the middle of the night.

We never stuck to the system, and so generally I just used my towel as long as I possibly could, until the murky smell of mildew and toothpaste started to pass from it onto me, undoing all the cleaning work of the previous shower.

And aside from candy, I brought in an extra bag of stuff for the poor children, full of soup cans and knick-knacks I’d salvaged from the trash.

We liked how her guilt looked in this form of benevolence.

I liked it better than the usual plebeian chicken noodle my mom got.

When I looked in the mirror, I sneered my upper lip and said, Benedict Arnold, Benedict Arnold, your head is on the block.

When I was about to graduate high school, I did notice a packet of yellow curry in the pantry while I was rummaging around, looking for a snack.

I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the noxious carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.

I took it with me to my first apartment that I shared with the utilities-shirker, and my second apartment with the noxious carpet, and in my third apartment, when I was twenty-seven, living alone across the country, I opened it up one night when I was hungry and made a delicious paste with butter and milk, and then I ate it over chicken and rice and cried the whole way through it.