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Brother

For years the person he feared most was not his mother or father, not his teacher, not the bad kids in class who smoked and brawled, not Ah Fei the local street tough, but that other self in that photograph. It was a fear verging on hatred.

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The Assignment

The approach to the farmhouse is not meant for walking, and Bibi feels that she is barely making any progress. The haze blankets her surroundings, giving her approach a dreamlike quality as images come into focus like memories and dissolve like dreams. Slashes of moss-green lawn, the sharp, blue inhalation of what is perhaps a swimming pool. Bibi wonders why swimming pool floors are always painted blue and if this has anything to do with the sky and the ocean. She wonders what it would be like to swim in the ocean and look up at a blue sky.

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A Third Alice

After the wine guy was gone from her life forever, Mary lit a fourth cigarette, a brand you can’t get here. She couldn’t explain exactly what was so upsetting to her. And then from the blah bar emerged Alice—a small, brilliant, self-contained, comely brunette with a conversational knowledge of the mother of Alexander the Great—Alice, of whom Mary had taken so little notice in the past, who without saying a word, because she had no secrets, at this very moment rested her head upon Mary’s shoulder.

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The GrubHub of Human Affliction

We had a color-coded system for managing the hierarchy of suffering: green was for welfare snafus, lead paint violations, legal procedural errors, fertilizer-related illness, corporate malfeasance and minor environmental damage; yellow was for assault in jail, wrongful conviction, citywide poisoning, retaliatory solitary confinement, grievous and preventable workplace injuries, strikebreaking at the national scale, anti-labor espionage of any kind; red was for police murders, police or military torture, counter-radical operations involving violence or murder, war crimes (many of these last categories pertaining to refugees who had lost their homes or family members to American military campaigns).

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Little Miss Bigmouth

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.

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Quarantine

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.

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The Ellipse Maker

It was disappointing that these devices didn’t operate on different principles. The sameness suggested that the mystery in them was limited, that the idea behind them was a known form that Jacob hadn’t encountered before only because he didn’t know very much about the world.

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Ace

We transformed the living room into an arena. Hauled the coffee table from the center of the room and carried it into the dining room. Removed objects that could cause a freak accident — a statue sitting on a low mantle that my parents picked up on their honeymoon, the fireplace poker we never used. We took the cushions and pillows from the couch and spread them across the floor, covered sharp edges with throw blankets and with my bedroom comforter.

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Kairos, the Lucky Moment—and the Long Time That Follows

Kairos, the god of fortunate moments, is supposed to have a lock of hair on his forehead, which is the only way of grasping hold of him. Because once the god has slipped past on his winged feet, the back of his head is sleek and hairless, nowhere to grab hold of. Was it a fortunate moment, then, when she, just 19, first met Hans?

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Il Castello dei Mann

Didn’t he know that I was a servant, and how capable I was of managing humiliation and disgust? I felt he was even endearing, in his desire to escape his wife, his crowd of guests—and this smirk I felt now, and bubbling up laughter in the silence of my parked car, were the symptoms of power I’d never felt before.