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 other night at a party in Westlake Hills, just outside of Austin, I stepped outside to get some air and found a group of my old friends sitting around a fire pit in the backyard, smoking cigarettes. It was a strange sight, not only because I hadn’t seen most of these people in several…
We woke to a world opened up in holes, a dawn still stained with spots of night. Stoking the stove, we stood, went to the window, blew out the lamp to better see: out there, beneath the barely brightening sky, the snow-smooth pasture somehow gone guttate while we slept. Letting out the dog, we lingered…
Russell woke, his mouth dry and sour with fear. His back ached and his hands were stiff, raw, the blood swelling in his knuckles like he was young again, fighting again. A warm wind came from the window, pure and solitary-smelling in the way of predawn hours. And he could smell the jasmine that Alice…
When she arrived at Grisha’s, Marina heard the fierce sound of clanging cookware. This meant Aneta was angry. These days, Aneta was always angry. To hear her tell it, she hated being a home attendant, detested old people and their smell, found Grisha a dissolute lecher and couldn’t stand dirty Brooklyn sidewalks. Their employer, VIP…
It took three weeks for Gwaza to disintegrate. Even after he was gone, his smell carried in a thick veil of flies, keeping the house door shut and all the windows closed. People walking by on their way to Church carrying gossip, or back from work with roadside onions and Friday night Chicken Licken stopped…
The decision had been made the night before, though I’d played very little part in it. We’d been lying in bed and she’d said it had to be done. And because the day had been long and we were tired and a bit drunk, I thought it might not stick, and hoped it wouldn’t. It…
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