Rosemarie knew the flight would be long and difficult—nineteen hours from New York to Buenos Aires—but she’d thought that she’d made all the necessary preparations. None of them seemed to be of much use, though: the special horseshoe-shaped pillow, melatonin, the relaxation app, not eating the airline food, and drinking only water. She’d made herself…
Shea sees the tent from a long way off before she decides it is a tent. The shape is all wrong, figures outside in arterial-red rain gear—movements too breathy. The red matches the red of the tent, popping against the gray-green of the mountains. A giant, globed, spherical cloud hovers just behind them in the…
The encounter I am about to describe took place in October or November of 1990, late at night, during an Amtrak trip from Chicago to Ann Arbor. On that route in those days, it was not uncommon for trains to make unexplained stops miles from the nearest town, then sit for hours. For the most…
We bought a house. Right before the pandemic hit the planet and turned all thoughts of the future into a gooey mess. Would there be one? A future I mean. How smart would it be to sign those closing papers when maybe the entire planet’s population teetered on the brink of going busto? But we…
Paulie showed up the day my mother had her heart attack. He arrived after midnight, all long legs with big feet tucked into sneakers that looked like giant marshmallows, bedhead, and a sneer curling his lips. His mother didn’t bother to come up and thank me for taking him in. She didn’t have space for…
“You don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” my wife says softly with lowered eyes. She is afraid I may change my mind again. “Ellie, dear,” I reassure her, “I do want to come with you.” Her face brightens, and she promptly puts her gloves on. Her fingers fidget with the black satin…
That’s what his profile said. My attraction to it was the latest in a string of developments to alert me that I was getting old. The other big ones lately had been the movement from few enough gray hairs to pluck to too many to count; the affinity for houseplants; the humorless fear of the…
Early mornings, we trudge single file along a snowy footpath, nerves tingling, anticipating our destination: a frozen, arena-size lake in the middle of the woods. The trail is part of Coach Yablonski’s fifty-acre estate, and the only other footprints crisscrossing the snow are from the hooves of deer and elk, paws of mountain lion, scurrying…
Once, we were blameless, we women of Corinth. We watched over our children within our mudbrick walls, teaching the boys to play and the girls to please. We ground the grain in the kitchen till the wheat dust covered our cheeks. We wove the cloth in the workroom, pulling and twisting and winding the soft…
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