Name the goat. This is the most valuable information given by the inmates. If you name it, you cannot eat it. You will care for it. You will see it has a soul. The goat will become like your child. And then they will set you free.
It wasn’t until snorkeling in the Pacific that Louisa began to understand her marriage: the sympathy in their mutual misunderstanding, or the inexorable distance between them, or maybe, only, the magnificence of needlefish.
In sickness and in health, the marriage of your body to yourself, forever. The body does not believe in divorce. Put your soft body inside metal bodies like cars and trains and airplanes, take your body to the beach and burn it brown with oil. Bleach your teeth. Dye your hair. Ornament the flesh with ink pulled from the roots of plants. Drown it in boxed red wine you’ll throw up in your friend’s bathtub. Look at pictures of yourself as a child and reminisce about eating paper, how your body absorbed it all without flinching. Remember swallowing gum. Swallowing communion wafers. Wonder if the remnants of Christ’s body still line your stomach as protective coating against future fuck ups—holy antacids against the acid reflux of sin.
The esteemed American novelist, Greg Ivanovski, arrived via the New Canaan branch on a Wednesday morning. By lunchtime, the rumble of loafers and wedge heels had the walnut paneling of the dining hall chattering and the Louis IX chandeliers rocking on their chains. Where had this swarm been only moments ago? Huddled in sleep behind the lancet arches? The cafeteria staff jostled the thrumming scholars into manageable lines, but finally had to impose the fire safety limit, with one particularly tragic result—Irish playwright Niall Glenn was forced to stand swaying from foot to foot in the outer hall for twelve full minutes before being allowed inside.
Greg Ivanovski did not attend the lunch.
At best, a short story can only approach perfection, never attain it. A novella has to be perfect. A novel has to be a sprawling mess. I am thinking of these things as I walk around my neighborhood in Bombay. The streets are wet from the first monsoon showers, which abated only half an hour back. Growling autorickshaws find their way through puddles, sometimes splashing water, and I hop and skip to avoid being at the receiving end. But this is a futile exercise, so I tell myself to just walk, unmindful of how dirty I get. I am walking because…because after twenty months of separation she has invited me to visit her.
Beth Wolpert was bragging about her son James’s old high school accomplishments again. Sitting at the VFW, waiting for another Natural Ice, she went on about how he won senior class president, how handsome he was and how many girls she used to catch him with when he thought she was working. “Once,” she started, “he had three girls in the basement, two blonds and a brunette—no shit—all of ‘em naked as the day they was born!” she laughed.
Like most mornings during the past six years, you awake from a lovely, deep sleep suffused with the thoughts that you would molest your own children, kill strangers, harm any life that came across your path.
Here’s where we are right now: at two empty rolls of cigarettes, one roll stashed with a three-to-one of ganja to tobacco, a separate portion of unadulterated ganja that will fill all of the third joint (exclusively for her), and some spared seeds gathered inside the sheets of the hotel’s menu card. She is checking emails on her work phone. She is huffing and puffing at an MSNBC expert who is predicting another market crash. The joints she is preparing do not have the slickness she once prided herself in, but she is trying.