Translated by John Cullen We were in Paradise: there was the fig tree and, over on the right, the apple tree, only half of which I could see through the big French window that opened onto the courtyard; there was moreover a cloud of birds so dense you could imagine it contained an infinite number…
Translated by Lydia Davis When he starts telling stories, people gradually leave the table or turn away and talk about something else, and generally I’m the one who then has the bad luck to be obliged to listen to him. Someone must listen to him, after all, and he is a friendly man and a…
Translated by Lydia Davis Egon is no longer with us, we have buried him—we, a little band of people. Egon was my friend, and he was my reader. I knew him a long time and really from a distance, one of many in the bar, and he burdened people with tricky questions, he could really…
A sudden gust of wind blew strands of Polly Stillman’s brown hair across her face, obscuring her view of the late afternoon sun on Hatch’s Bay. No matter, she didn’t see a composition anyway. In past summers, this scene usually inspired a painting—of beach grass shadows slashing the bright dunes; of a large rock, encrusted…
Begin with the priest, that towering old man, narrow as a cornstalk and motionless in the vacancy between lectern and pulpit. His attachment to the tick-tock undertaking of time is acting up. He gets stuck in certain moments or skips ahead like those oft-scratched forty-fives of his youth. Stationary on the elevated platform, he poses…
On the plastic monthly calendar stuck to the refrigerator, Michelle hadn’t bothered to write the dates in the little boxes. Monday was Monday, Tuesday was Tuesday. The dates didn’t matter. Desmond’s routine filled the days: school=red dots, occupational therapy=orange dots, water therapy=green dots, speech therapy=yellow and brown checked dots. The stickers formed a lively zigzag…
We were driving back from a weekend away at a friend’s house in Normandy when I thought I saw my father—his pebbly gray ashes indisputably scattered and sunk in the icy Atlantic ten long winters before—now alive and well, a passenger in a neighboring coupe. “Dad,” I whispered in astonishment, like a little extra exhalation…
First, some disclaimers: I know what you’re thinking. Where does Sasha Porter, otherwise known as the Family Pariah, get off thinking she can pull it together long enough to tell you a story? That it should be my sister, Zora the Great, telling this story. Zora, the writer; Zora, Daddy’s favorite. Yes, that Zora. But,…
We three brothers spent the afternoon outside in the haze and half rain. We trekked the empty field out behind the decommissioned paper mill where our father used to work and we were fallen upon by ashes from Mount St. Helens, which had erupted three days ago, and once more two days after. Though the…
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