She wasn’t surprised to end up in his office, but she’d always thought it would be about her son, not her daughter. There was a lesson in it: Instead of worrying about the ones who didn’t fit in, you should worry about the ones who seemed to fit in too well. “It’s not uncommon,” he…
Then he reflected that reality does not usually coincide with our anticipation of it; with a logic of his own he inferred that to foresee a circumstantial detail is to prevent its happening. —“The Secret Miracle,” by Jorge Luis Borges M woke up in a strange room with her name, Leeza, on his lips. A…
Let’s say the world comes to you from outside. Why not? What are you but malleable organic bodies, nothingness within variegated layers of hard and soft tissue pumped with H2O, birthed into the torment of the world? Your orifices—eyes, ears, nose, mouth, anus, genitals, skin—flutter open, and you are ready for business. Me, Kitty, too….
Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval Ocean, there is nonewithout shipwrecks, without the drownedwithout victimsthere is no oceanthat does not lick the shore like a sore or a wound.
Just past midnight, when it looked like things might get out of hand, Greer brought out the baseball bat he kept under the bar and, holding it cocked, edged toward the tall red-haired punk with the bad mouth, and his two jerk friends. “Time to go home, boys,” he said. “You better think, man,” the…
I once told Percival Everett that of the impressive people it’s been my good fortune to meet, he is the least impressed with himself. His response was characteristic and delivered in a complete and sincere deadpan, “Well, I’ve met me.” This willingness to foreground the work over the artist is especially notable about someone who…
Translated from the Spanish by Jesse Lee Kercheval I ask where the things go that did not arrive at their destination. Themajority of things. The largest inventory in the world. Where are theygoing to end up, the things that do not end up anywhere. Those thatfail, those that have no remedy. I ask where do…
The woman having a miscarriage bumps into the woman getting an abortion. It is New Year’s Eve. They are both in line at the pharmacy, buying ibuprofen. One carries a basket holding a bottle of wine, the other four candy bars. There are many people ahead of them. “Those look good,” says the first, glancing…
In the Plan B essay series, writers discuss their contingency plans, extraliterary passions, and the roads not traveled. I’m what surfers call a goofy foot. I surf with my left foot back. The etymology of goofy foot is disputed, but consensus points toward the cartoon character Goofy, who surfed with his right foot forward…
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