Short Story
Les Affaires
Liv does not have a boyfriend, nor has she since ending an eight-month affair with a bluegrass musician. He gave concerts most nights of the week while she sat and pretended to be interested in the plight of the 19th-century Appalachian. At a house show in someone’s living room, the bluegrass musician beaned Liv in the head with the neck of his banjo. She scanned the crowd, but everyone seemed too drunk to have noticed.
Rise Awake
I yawned, stretched, and exited the master bath, thinking: It’s so nice to be able to keep the bathroom door open around a woman, and my ex-wife was flying above our bed. Technically, legally, it’s just my bed now except for twenty-nine minutes last night when we revisited well-explored territories. We knew it was wrong and confusing—discussed that openly while I sucked each one of her toes, ran the backs of my fingers along the insides of her thighs.
Next Year
After she bought the house, there was a month of newness, of fresh, invigorating possibility, the feeling of Yes, why had she ever doubted? It is possible to begin again.
A Thing For Which Gabriella Has No Shame
She also bought twenty legal pads and five boxes of pens, because she planned to keep a record of the chaos, from a chair in front of the window of her sixth story apartment. She’d positioned the chair already. She’d even stacked some blankets next to the chair for when the power went out and the radiators groaned and fell silent. She bought tarps, duct tape, caulk, and Plexiglas—things to repair the broken windows resulting from the inevitable explosions and stray bullets.
Loft Party Thrown by Future Leaders of America in a Repurposed Old Factory in the City’s Newly Revitalized but Mostly Still Empty Warehouse District
It’s a great neighborhood. It reminds me a lot of Brooklyn, but also kind of like the Mission mixed a little with Hoxton and the Left Bank, but without all the gross people we don’t like. I could totally live there.
Hoof Boy
Then the pigs started dying, and the men in masks came at night, and people in town started to use words like ecoterrorists and sabotage. Some of the people were saying environmentalists, instead.
Loan
The day after M. called me to say that he was too ill to come to dinner, that he was in pain and couldn’t get out of bed, and his voice sounded carefully starched, like he’d primed it for this one phone call—the day after that was when they told me he’d put a bag over his head and shot himself...
What We Learned
I hoped he’d come to God on his own, so I didn’t make him go to church with me unless he wanted, delighted when he did, disillusioned when he didn’t.
That’s Where You Should Begin
My brother Marco believes he is the reincarnation of an Aztec warrior. He returned from another tour of the desert as a luchador, still in costume, and he told me about the ghost inside him as he leapt around the living room, practicing for some wrestling match he fears will be his last. He is determined to die in the ring, figures it's his destiny. He finds omens in swirling desert sand, in the cloud a bit of milk makes in coffee.