I closed my eyes. The narrow rocky trail. The deep, deep canyon. My stomach reeled. No guardrail, no parachute, no wings, and me with no terminal illness. Me, weaker than I’d ever suspected I could be. “How soon? I’ve got deadlines. Could we wait till Fall?”
She laughed again, then coughed, coughed again, her whole frame wracked. “For you,” when she could speak, “for you, I’ll buy a postcard.”
The days are long and light so late. Ceremony is the faint lull of your roommate playing “Linger on your pale blue eyes” through a thin painted wall while you boil a kettle. The inside of a blue eye is like Iceland. Iceland is like a hot bath body with a cold forehead but you haven’t been, except in the airport. The Reykjavik airport is like a coffee shop.
I contemplate the exhaustion of grief. Perhaps I’ve never truly known it, having never known the loss of a parent, spouse, or child. Please doctor, when will this unending grieving end? You were wrong. I grieved for six months, 180 days, 4000 hours, 15 million seconds. I did my duty.
She watched him from the back, the red glow of his cigarette a lone light against the black sky. Sometimes, she went out to join him, hastily dressed in a cotton kamiz and shalwar, a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. He turned around and gave her a smile with his stained yellow teeth, then turned back to gaze at the street below with his large, almond-shaped eyes.
I crash cars. Or rather: I crash my body into cars. Maybe that’s an exaggeration. An aspirational statement. Here’s the truth: only twice in my life have I done this.
If the harvest nights are clear, adults stir.
If comfortable, they talk about past loves. Accidents and hope. They complain about jobs and get even with the boss. They search for life’s rhythms. Delighted by the rhyme, they explore the possibilities of change. Then they lounge, drunk upon words.
I remember these images in no particular order: _the fragility of his body, the sparkling nerdiness of his glasses, or the shimmering brilliance of his palm oil complexion. I was still thinking of bodies in terms of complexion when we first met. Although America has a way of taking away […]
Myrtle told Horace the plan. They would take the 7:14 train to the city, to a bar called The Pit Stop.
“It’s a gay bar,” she said. “But this one has a back room. Do you understand me?”
Robert Jones, Jr. is the author of The New York Times Bestselling novel, The Prophets, which was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction and has been translated into nineteen languages. He was born and raised in New York City and received his BFA in creative writing […]
Suffocation rarely starts in a panic. Sometimes it begins in a drowsy state of not-knowing, the air warm and dense. Do something productive. Get out of the house. I grabbed the macaroni pan, went behind the barn, plucked wild blackberries till the pan brimmed.
Jerry seemed a smart lad, but he was more interested in herbs and spices when he should be paying attention to poisons.
A Touch of Jen, written by Brooklyn College MFA alum Beth Morgan, centers Alicia and Remy, two codependent Brooklynites miserable in their coupledom but bonded by a shared infatuation with the titular Jen—a breezy influencer with freckled boobs and adult braces whose appeal is equated to that of a “hot […]
Marianne wore a nice dress and looked very handsome in it. It was her 32nd birthday. Marianne is six feet tall. She and I had an agreement. We would see how it went at the Sendak Museum and go from there.
The first time I saw them, more than a decade ago now, they were standing in a circle behind the sun’s shadow.
It seems hard to believe that she, Darla, has met a Viscount through an online dating service, but he (his name she reminds herself is “Rupert”) has confirmed that yes, indeed, he does have a title. He did so with a self-deprecating shrug as if to say it was entirely out of his hands.
“There are a few starlings in there adding to the syncopation,” a woman said to me in the Trader Joe’s parking lot. Her safari hat slipped down the back of her head. Her white hair flashed a beat of purple. Her zinc sunscreen beamed in patches next to her nose and beneath her ear lobe. A zucchini rested at the top of her grocery bag, which she lowered to the pavement, to slide her hat back over her head. She needed a proper look at the tree.
Things were changing around the office. We had to adapt, they said, to high velocity change in the marketplace. Rapid innovation was necessary. Customer experience paramount. Engaged employees a must. All of us a part of something, all of us human beings. They brought in a ping pong table. Put […]
1 A bull and a matador. Nobody mentioned the painting. No one even asked Virginia what trash heap he’d dug it out of. By the time I noticed it, I was on my second or third boilermaker. I’m more embarrassed saying this than you are hearing it, but the bull […]
I wasn’t getting anything done. And I was working all the time. At least I felt like I was working. Everything I was doing felt like something that someone else was telling me to do. But no one was telling me to do anything. And that meant the voice that […]
I woke up to a loud rapping at the door. It was my landlord again, looking for the rent. It was the middle of the month and he’d been at this for days. Every few hours he’d bang away, screaming his head off. I’d let him get it out of […]