Our drummer wants to know how our spirits are. He’s the only one who thinks we’ll make it. Our drummer sees light, swears the storm’s over. Our drummer, the embodiment of the world’s worst cover of Sublime’s “What I Got,” pleads with us: “This is nothing—dudes, this is nothing!” The van’s gray upholstering droops down …
“We’re supposed to run,” Grant says. It’s dinner. We eat at the small round kitchen table underneath the multicolored rustic light fixture, which casts a warm rainbow glow. This is where Family Time is served. Also, it’s Taco Night. Classical music is playing from our iWhatever on the countertop. My wife likes to keep it …
These days Isabelle’s exhaustion anchors itself in strange places. She feels it in her sagging wrists and the top of her head. As warm static at her fingertips. An oil slick in the gut. She’s been the night attendant at the Speedway for seven and a half years. Never before has daytime sleep eluded her …
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 …