The day Judy had kittens, Carl Bernstein came to my house. The veterinarian had called it a hysterical pregnancy. Sometimes a cat will think she is pregnant and bloat up, but it’s all in her head. The vet was so definite about this. Two of the kittens were white and one was a calico. Carl…
I’m fourteen and I ride a silver bike with knobby tires through a suburban landscape filled with cul-de-sacs. Fast as a mongoose. Jeans that grip my thighs and ankles. Checkered sneakers. Black turtleneck and a puffy, emergency-colored vest. The air smells like firewood because every house has a chimney and every chimney is burning. I…
Every month, there were two or three phone queries like this one. Someone had bought a Monet at a yard sale in Weaverville or found a Grecian urn in a woodshed. One deranged caller claimed he’d discovered the missing arms of the Venus de Milo. Others wanted him to evaluate folk art, hoping some elderly…
Mornings while I brush my teeth I lay my four-month-old daughter on a towel on the floor of our glassed-in shower, safe and clean. The shower is tiled in button mushroom travertine and features a rainfall fixture and adjustable body sprays. My baby’s cry is a plaintive hollow sound in there. After I birthed her,…
Translated from the Chinese by Ting Wang Upon returning home, the first things my auntie saw were two big speckled roosters encircled by net bags. One squatting, the other standing, both appeared fairly sagacious. Once she spotted the roosters, Auntie knew my cousin was back. She looked carefully at the ground—maybe the roosters had good…
No, no, no—that’s not how it goes. I’m putting too many words in. Start again. I should tell it so that it begins with silence, with snow, show you the frozen speckle-strewn fawn I found at wood’s edge behind the cabin’s bark-stripped walls. I should tell it so that a six-year-old can understand because that’s…
Sometimes I looked over at who I was married to forever. She was on her side of the bed, me on mine. It’ll hit you now and then, this feeling. I got up for work, and she said, “What’s your problem?” But she didn’t want to know. I was throwing boxes for UPS. They hired…
OK, it bore mention: she’d slept with the guy once, more out of politeness than anything else. This was up in Montreal the previous winter. She and Theo Mirsky, the man who signed her paychecks, were working their way back from dinner with investors at a distinguished, much revered, but otherwise not very good brasserie…
Ben was late for school pickup; Wednesday was Diana’s day, but he’d forgotten that she had a meeting at the university until she texted him just after 3:00. When he picked Olivia up on time, he had to wait in a long line of cars until one of the teachers checked his dashboard sign, then…
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