Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.| n+1Articles – n+1
Let me just finish disinfecting a table number marker and then off I go, I just have to put down what I’ve got in my hands to serve, I tell her that with my eyes, yes I’m coming, I’ve seen the whole thing, I saw you adding the sauces, the napkins, I know the order’s complete and besides that’s all I’ve got to do, serve, I’m available, I’m capable of taking that initiative. The crewmember calls for me all the same, she’s looking right at me and she calls for me.| n+1Articles – n+1
“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”| n+1Articles – n+1
This was how I would first understand Pavement’s music: dense bursts of esoterica punctuated here and there by mellow springs of warm pop hum, an Oasis of boredom in a desert of horror. Various forms of self-fashioning followed, and soon I became myself, a guy named Stephen who smirks and scoffs and dodges questions compulsively, who dresses preppy but never combs his hair.| n+1Articles – n+1
He wouldn’t be thinking of my daughter, but then I also hadn’t been thinking of my daughter. Now I brought to mind her classroom, which I’d seen only once, during parents’ night. I brought it to mind deliberately and placed her at a little round table, reading a book, eating a snack. I imagined her hands, which still looked like the hands of a toddler. My son had elegant hands.| n+1Articles – n+1
They could write a short story honoring the thwarted child by envisioning what its life might have become. The story had to be a minimum of ten pages double-spaced, with an honest attempt at showing rather than telling. Mike figured he’d give it a shot, as he’d prefer not to shell out more money to the government. Lord knew he already paid plenty in taxes.| n+1Articles – n+1
Raya and Karim moved back into the family home. Her parents rented two gloomy rooms on the first floor of a house and shared a kitchen and a bathroom with the tenants upstairs. To Raya the rooms felt closed in and the whole house smelled sour. There was a narrow lane between their house and the one next door, and men passing by sometimes used the alley as a urinal.| n+1Articles – n+1
Out last night with Deja for a drink at a new bar near campus. The bar is nice but cannot decide who it is for. Drinks too sweet. After two my head was heavy. Hers too perhaps. I feel so grateful to have met you, she said. It’s when she says things like that.| n+1
I drink all the wine in the cellar before my friend flies into town. It’s just me and two housekeepers, four groundskeepers, and her mother’s best friend, who texts me from the next room whenever she’s leaving for yoga. Whenever I run into her, making coffee in the kitchen or by the pool, she’s stretching with a pained look on her face, her reading glasses twisted on Croakies around her neck.| n+1
A world of muffled noise and muted color, personal space that speaks in inches, bland food served cool. It’s an apt time for reflection. Retrospection, I guess you’d say. On a long enough flight you could screen the whole movie of your life, director’s cut and all the bonus features. But the Portland–LA flight was barely two hours, and I wasn’t looking to root around in the archives of my memory palace. I was mulling and brooding, yes, but not over ancient history.| n+1
There wasn’t time for the students to read their work, which disappointed no one. “Finish these tonight,” I said. “Bring them in tomorrow.” “I’m done,” Eloise said. “Can I hand it in now?” “Give it a once-over tonight,” I said. “It’s really done.| n+1
When she’s in a state of panic, my mother bargains with the Lord and imposes fioretti on herself: no eating sweets, no going to the movies, no reading magazines, no listening to Rai Radio 3, for weeks, months, years. These days she can’t go to the hairdresser’s or watch TV. Sometimes the combination is no Radio 3 and no sweets. Or no coffee and no new shoes. She mixes them, matches them — it depends.| n+1
I would see all her bright colors and form a very hazy idea of the whole. She seemed to be repainting the same picture over and over again, and every time I walked by my impression grew more distinct. I also began to feel uncontrollably jealous, half convinced her painting was one I had conceived of long ago and simply hadn’t had a chance to paint yet.| n+1