“Duty spun at the center of Dan’s being. In ancient times, he would have carried Juno across the river, and parted the seas if it meant that one girl with chemically shedding blonde hair would get to live out a childish marriage fantasy.”
To telescope, we begin with 300 words, then slice the word count in half for each successive section. We stop when the numbers stop dividing evenly. Looking around and beyond us, this week we telescope “space.”
“They probably thought Evan just smelled like that: nauseatingly floral like Katie Levi-Moretti, the first girl in his high school class to discover perfume and, therefore, the last person everybody wanted to sit next to at assembly.”
“In part, the devastation of Conversations with Friends lies in its ability to pinpoint the impurities that taint how we care for one another, without offering a clear or optimistic way out.”
“More than a few miles from home, I conclude this first sliver of college convinced of the notion that I’m more fiction than fact. Now more than ever, I feel like a character, and not a good one.”
“The chunks of Amie’s life were too insignificant to be measured in Christ or Common Era. Even her birthdays seemed an inaccurate measurement of the passage of time.”
“Regardless, an aquiline parasite lived inside me, compelling me violently with its bald-eagle talons to wage psychological Revolutionary Warfare against my own best friend.”