translated from the Danish by Misha Hoekstra Nina Hansen’s on her way home and it’s been a long day. While she was researching and writing, she almost didn’t notice that buzzing in her ear. Her left ear. When she’s idle and alone, it feels as if a bumblebee’s sitting in there, the kind you find…
This is the latching on. You are shelter and source, and this is the smell of only you. The hands that hold and lift and swaddle, the mouth that smiles and sings me, the eyes that look me into being: yours. This is the skin to skin. I cry to make the hungry stop and…
It was a job Gary stumbled into while he was already gainfully employed as a CPA in Spoonington, Indiana. He and Dinah were at a dinner party at the home of one of her colleagues. Dinah was a lawyer who’d kept her own name. “Even if I did believe in taking another person’s name,” she’d…
Trevor’s father said to go on and get in the Suburban with Jean and her kids. Trevor balked and his sister Lesley-Ann acted like she wouldn’t even be able to cross the yard unless he came with her. Trevor’s father told him again to go on, and Trevor did. Halfway across the yard he could…
Gray skies. A silver tray of individually wrapped cheeses. Bad coffee in boardrooms. That was Prague to me, that “city of a hundred spires.” And I might have boarded the plane knowing nothing more had Antonin not turned to me during that final dinner and said, “If you are free tomorrow, perhaps we go on…
No one was having a good day. It was December in Minnesota and we were all at a stage in our lives where our therapist thought we might be less loserlike if we met late Monday morning. Late morning because early morning wasn’t an option for some of us—because some of us couldn’t keep ourselves…
We fight about her birth control pills, for one thing. They cost about twenty dollars, and Tamara wants me to buy them, and that is something she has wanted for some time. At Planned Parenthood, they have my name on a form, she tells me. She writes down the address and sticks it in my…
The night before he left for basic training, Ebo had one last pigeon to kill—a cream barred homer from the old line of Stichelbaut. The bird was from a long strain of impressive racers, a gift from his mother when he was nine years old. Ebo had put off killing this bird, his favorite, by…
The Twerp’s new record has been playing for hours, but it seems like days. It seems like it’s been playing his whole life. His ears have turned red from excitement. It has that sound, the one he has been describing his whole life. In this room of rooms, the walls have walls and he lingers…
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