Here is the alley, laced in shadow—not the kind you, a wary member of the audience, would traipse alone at night. Yet here comes our Jenny: a pale girl, limp brown hair, just thirteen, eyes a hue identical to your daughter’s.
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“Why don’t you have a notebook out?”
“It’s not my style to write notes after the intake.”
“Well, I thought about it in the waiting room today.”
“How you would stage it?”
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I shake the green box and nothing falls out, so I yell for Bruce, I say, Bruce, did you move the money from the commission, and he says, You spent that already, Dear.
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I discover one morning that if I delay my cup of coffee, I feel high. Although the only drug I’ve tried is pot—and really it just made me sleepy—I think this must mirror the idealized experience: the daze, the calm, emotions padded as if swathed in bubble wrap.
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You’re 19 when a man offers you the only thing you’ve ever wanted: you can travel wherever you want, to whatever time you want. All you have to do is leave your family behind and never see them again.
You’re 19 and this is an easy decision. You board his ship without saying goodbye, and there you go.
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We like the first lieutenant.
We like his teeth, clean and bright as Normandy, where we went (+Duquesne) early in another deployment. No, Arlington, we decide, his teeth perfectly flat and perfectly white like tombstones.
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Going to meet a friend, the woman spies a lake monster one night as she drives by the reservoir. Only its snaky head and then its tail, so green it’s like seeing the color for the first time, vanishing into the water.
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Arturo is in the Resistance. Of course, it isn’t called the Resistance. It isn’t called anything. One cannot speak of the Resistance because one never knows who is listening, whom to trust, who else belongs.
Read MoreSteven stands outside his engagement party at his future in-laws’ beach house, headphones jammed in his ears, smoking a joint to calm himself before going back inside.
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