The skylight filled with snow, like whitened ash. Three traders flagged a taxi going south. Inside the bank, the ATM spat cash. You put your shivering fingers to its mouth. Knowing tomorrow the temperature would rise, Manhattan churned the Easter snow to mud. I saw the faintest passion in your eyes. The doctors found new…
is right, the pear is always askew at the brink, always in danger of falling straight out of the world of sphere toward the floor we don’t often see, that might be painted a rosy brown or gray green and still tilt into the landscape that needs brushstrokes to complete it, to fill in—but he…
How do you sleep? he asked, and I said Wait—I know— because I didn’t know. My husband insists I sleep a certain way. —Not on your stomach? He seemed disappointed. Then on your back? —Maybe, my back, or my side. I didn’t tell him, I sleep like something tossed onshore, —or the way we are…
There were only a few perfect spots in the world, and Leo Spivak had finally found one of them, right here in Mendocino. He was stretched out just inside the screen door of the brown-shingled beachfront cottage he and his wife, Rachel, had rented for a week-just the two of them, alone in all this…
I keep remembering how he said You couldn’t bite into one without staining the meat. Egret ice lily egg bone-china white, only wounded, streaked by the skin’s rich red. Heraclitus, Heisenberg, a boy up a tree on a farm. And how they proved uncommercial. No good for butter, no good for pies. You had to…
No one is awake yet, neither the cardinals who live in the gnarled, rotted-out apple tree, nor Lucy my younger daughter whose shrieks are our alarm and birdsong. This is the best hour, neither night nor morning, a place in which shadows become more real than the things that cast them. …
I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family, how an argument could end up with his father grabbing a lit birthday cake in both hands and hurling it out a second-story window. That, I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger sent out across the sill, landing like a gift…
For five seconds or so, backwards seems possible, the heirloom un-be-smithereenable. When the voice first said gently, “We lost her,” Wally roared, “Then go find her!” Freeze frame: this is Simon and me at the pier, alive in some previous hour. Happy, we were happy beyond disbelief.
Wherever we travel it seems to take the same few hours to get there. The plane rises over clouds into an unmarked sky, comes down through clouds to what we have to believe is a different place. But here are the same green road signs the numbered highways of home, with cars going back and…
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