You knew everyone we wished we knew and we loved when you called them by their first names. Salman. Margaret. Arundhati. At each class, you blew into the room, scarf ends trailing and knitted cap askew. You only ever hinted at an excuse before launching into the daily lesson. Avoid exclamation marks! Never use the…
It is May. Or it is June or July—or August. Or maybe it isn’t Simone’s most hated time of year. Maybe it’s just that the days feel long and that they burn, the sensation of being trapped in an oven. The brief peace promised by the night shatters like a pane of opaque glass, pierced…
The hospital room was narrow, with one window that faced another building, a thin strip of light giving the illusion of perpetual twilight. The first night, Eve slept on the bed and Manu stayed in the corner on a vinyl armchair that reclined into a cot. The walls behind Manu’s chair were papered with signs:…
1. STORY Shhhh! her mother said. Sit down.Next to me. Time to read. The girl climbed up on the couch,crossed her ankles. Pay attention. A yellow picture book. Notice that the word “monkey” sounds like “Monica.” The title character.George, lived in Africa, a continent that on her globe was colored red.The leaves on the skinny…
A violent stirring of the interiorunfolding by churns. What we begin with is disequilibrium.The slurred echoing of the eye. Call it misrecognition:thinking it’s the earth that’s blurrywhen it’s the mind. – Lost are the coordinatesof the spirit, or the animalintuition that binds— What I mistook for a border was but a moving pointwhich makes me limitless,somehow…
Aging, he grew sure the country was gone to hell,not because of me but people too much like mefor me to tell the difference. And yethe’d shown me how to mound dark soil,firm and careful, around a cucumber seedlingto help it grow. Had let me drive the tractoror pretend, sitting on his lap as he…
—For Feiga Maler, 1919-1942, who died in the Kraków Ghetto Night after night, what she saw in her sleep:an upside down Havdalah candle like the one she litto usher in a new week at the end of every Sabbath, praying, “Blessed God, who separates light from dark…” The candle in her dreams, like her real…
There’s no heroism to it.Like getting dressed in the morning,it’s just practice: force my head past the collar,squiggle to pull up the zipperbehind my back, slither into tightsand distinguish blue pumps from black.I pour the cereal in my bowl the same wayeach morning because that’s how it’s done—life, the whole scribbled mess of it.There’s no…
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