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Week of 6/17/18


PUBLISHED: June 23, 2018

In an effort to better acquaint you, the reader, with the VQR staff, members of our team will share excerpts from our personal reading—The Best 200 Words I Read All Week. From fact to fiction, from comedic to tragic, we hope you find as much to admire in these selections as we do.

Click here for access to the complete project archive


1.

We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night. I sometimes heard Mom and Dad discussing the people who were after us. Dad called them henchmen, bloodsuckers, and the gestapo. Sometimes he would make mysterious references to executives from Standard Oil who were trying to steal the Texas land that Mom’s family owned, and FBI agents who were after Dad for some dark episode that he never told us about because he didn’t want to put us in danger, too.

Dad was so sure a posse of federal investigators was on our trail that he smoked his unfiltered cigarettes from the wrong end. That way, he explained, he burned up the brand name, and if the people who were tracking us looked in his ashtray, they’d find unidentifiable butts instead of Pall Malls that could be traced to him. Mom, however, told us that the FBI wasn’t really after Dad; he just liked to say they were because it was more fun having the FBI on your tail than bill collectors.

Office Manager Laura Plaia
Excerpt from The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

2. 

So much we once coveted. So much
That would have saved us, but lived,

Instead, its own quick span, returning
To uselessness with the mute acquiescence

Of shed skin. It watches us watch it:
Our faulty eyes, our telltale heat, hearts

Ticking through our shirts.
We’re here To titter at gimcracks, the naïve tools,

The replicas of replicas stacked like bricks.
There’s green money, and oil in drums.

Pots of honey pilfered from a tomb. Books
Recounting the wars, maps of fizzled stars.

In the south wing, there’s a small room
Where a living man sits on display. Ask,

And he’ll describe the old beliefs.
If you Laugh, he’ll lower his head to his hands

And sigh. When he dies, they’ll replace him
With a video looping on ad infinitum.

Special installations come and go. “Love”
Was up for a season, followed by “Illness,”

Concepts difficult to grasp. The last thing you see
(After a mirror—someone’s idea of a joke?)

Is an image of an old planet taken from space.
Outside, vendors hawk t-shirts, three for eight.

Editorial Intern
Excerpt from Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith

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