In the pool, all are equal. Everyone is as barefaced as you; faces no longer obscured by makeup, streaked and dyed hair trussed into swimming caps.
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Eve was scrubbing a pot when her dress tore at the seam on her right breast. It was an old dress, falling below the knees, but the material was said to last for centuries. Her legs were thin and white like the rest of her body. Her blonde hair was pulled back in a bun. Her face, stunning. Her eyes, blue.
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We still go to bed early, out of habit. I take the monitor from my bedside table and switch it on. George and I huddle around the black and white screen. Channel A, our channel, shows nothing but a blank square of white carpet.
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Sergio’s lovers give him many gifts. His two-bedroom luxury apartment is a recent milestone in his relationship with Cass; he’s only lived there for a year and it has yet to feel like home, but he doesn’t complain. He knows what it’s worth.
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Joy had been aware of the bees since the summer she accidentally ripped the towel holder from the bathroom wall. At five years old, she’d learned to run her own bath, to clean herself until she smelled of green soap, to dry and dress without anyone acknowledging that she had done it.
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I go by Fantastic. I live in a gambling town in no part of the country you’d ever want to know. Tragic. That's the name of our casino. Tragic. Never the. The carpet’s all wet and the place reeks with “Greg” (our name for Tragic’s footy meth stink).
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On the morning of the three-year anniversary of our mother’s death, my older sister Anne calls to tell me she’s two weeks late.
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When the suicides start in my kindergarten class, they’re just a game. Last Sunday, Krista’s grandmother pulled a radio into her bathwater to prevent the Parkinson’s going any further, so
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The personal assistant to the twin wrestling superstars is sitting in the folded-open backseat of a black SUV, listening to Jessie worry.
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My mother laid eggs. Each morning, she woke and found them warm between her legs, the shells protected by the soft rippled skin of her thighs. They were sky blue and rose pink and the soft purple-gray of early mornings. She nested with them in a pile of blankets on her bed.
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This is a day she hasn’t known to expect, when her husband will die. When she died, her husband brought her back; but when he dies, choking on a forkful of steak, she cannot do anything but watch.
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“Everyone should celebrate life,” says Guru Jon. “I have a letter here from a person who is dying. I won’t name their name, but they are in the terminal stages of stomach cancer. Their message to you? Be kind. That’s how you celebrate life.”
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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.
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