The Father, Deceased He appears in a hospital hallway. On the front porch of her home in Phoenix, with a clipboard in his hands, polite and distant, like he might ask her to switch internet service providers. Passing by on the sidewalk in Riley, the town where she grew up. Leaning out of his yellow …
Hard to say on which side of the Edenic divide she now lies, post divorce. Which was the land of innocence? The death of a marriage seemed an obvious kind of fall, but she was alone for the first time in years, grateful for it, discovering creation again and renaming things. Like wakefulness or archaeology …
Her name is Miranda, and she’s an Engler on her father’s side, raised to be proud of the good her family did during a troubled time. To this day, at every family gathering, an ancient Engler is helped to their feet to tell the story of the weeks, months, years after the Battle of Gettysburg, …
And now your breasts are the stars! Lean this way, please, a little more to the right, that’s it, hand here, shoulder dropped, okay, beautiful, okay, don’t breathe, got it! Just one more. . . . The technician’s name was Penny. “Oh good,” Rebecca said to the beaky older woman with sensibly cut hair, “you …
When the fatigue finally hit, her sleep brought dreams of Don before he overdosed, and in these dreams his skin was made of colorful crepe paper that kept tearing off when she reached for him, until all that was left was a tumbleweed frame, a hollow yellow bouquet of him. And when she woke in …
One: Oscar Peterson’s Piano Is Out of Tune And he’s strolling—back and forth, back and forth—in front of a bank of impressive windows that look out from his penthouse in the Amedeo Court Apartments. He is alone. But if you were there, Bess, you could lean an elbow on the empty bar and watch him …
1 After dinner, the conversation turns to celebrity sightings. The table’s littered with bowls of chocolate-covered almonds and date cookies and glasses of wine and bottles of beer. Someone says he saw Neil Young in a bookstore where he was about to give a reading but that Neil Young left before the reading began, which …
Yvette told Lora about the job at the symphony’s end-of-season party at the lake. There were burgers and beers, and the sun was bright, catching sharp flashes off the water. But nothing could stop the day from feeling like a funeral: Twelve cellists cut down to eight, eight bassists to six, four bassoonists to two. …
Merk Greco most of the year was a one-man operation. As Mercury’s Extermination he drove his cranberry Ford F-250 up and down St. Louis, scheduling termite jobs north and south (not west where the snobs lived, not east where it was Illinois). But when the weather got hot, the calendar full, he’d recruit an assistant …
For six hours a day, he watched the couple spin. At first, he despised them. It was emptiness for emptiness’s sake. A piece that exemplified all the worst impulses of contemporary art, the things that made people snicker and roll their eyes while they passed through the museum. Now, after so many hours alone with …