Our company’s founder who can be quite eccentric at times began almost a year ago now a system whereby once every fortnight she will step down as Chief Innovation Officer for a 24-hour period and be replaced by someone telecommuting-in from a developing nation.
As it had been with all the bad habits that she formed in life, she had only realized her dependence when it was far too late — too late for what? her therapist asked her, and she bit her nails to avoid a response, but in essence it had been too late to be saved from it. It was ironic — was she using ironic correctly? she never knew — that she had spent her whole life worshiping feminist narratives, but the whole time she had really thought of love as surrender. Maybe it was because she grew up religious.
Tad would come to each town and try to work. That was the idea as he passed through one-story motels or rentals near trailer parks, apartments with brown water in the tubs, toilets that did not flush and never would. He worked in three different Walmarts, each more gargantuan than the last, stores that could swallow societies, all with the acre of parking. He did his best thinking walking across these lots, to his car parked far from wherever he may have to utter words to another living person.
Benji’s Goals For Growth – Poker Elementary – Mrs. Applebottom’s Class
Faruk Šehić was born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, in 1970, just in time to experience the war (1992-95) as an officer in the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina, leading a frontline combat unit. A poet forced to be a warrior, he strives in his work to recover the value of life and literature destroyed by violence. His sentences are sharp because he wants to stab us with them so we too can feel the pain. They are relentlessly beautiful because the world does not need us to exist.
Where Harry and Helen Staley would sleep was obvious; Winnie would give up her full-sized bed and take the couch. She scrubbed the grimy black and white tile in the bathroom. She shopped for sophisticated snacks that would appeal to anyone: figs; a wedge of brie; a can of salted mixed nuts; two bottles of wine, one red, one white, each under six dollars, which would stretch her budget at that; and some sparkling water. New York had the best water, she heard people say, and had learned to repeat it.
My brother is over, as always after his Tuesday night AA. I open my apartment door as soon as he buzzes, turn back to the salmon I'm poaching in a cheap saucepan on the stove. My brother doesn't love salmon. He loves ice cream. We joke about this. “I smell salmon,” he says when he shuffles in the door, blue eyes smiling, backward Whole Foods baseball cap on his head. “Are you practicing your co-dependence on me again?”
The Lumena Center didn’t do much for me ever, and on a Friday night especially, with all of its fluorescent lights illuminating the worst in the shoppers and supplement poppers and gamers and everyone moving within. Samsun was a habitué of the Center’s VR cage, where guys, mostly, would play games wearing headsets, each assigned to a different padded cubicle. This abutted a literal cage where people gamed together and one of the challenges was not running into one another.
Grandmother loved the Latin names of the flowers she’d raise in her greenhouse and in her garden. She believed you should know everything about the things you love.
She made the rounds in the afternoon from one area of the garden to the other: the rose patch, the dark ivy twisting around a metal arch leading to the left of the house, the white lotus flowers floating on the pond on the other side.
A different wood; a different moon. This is the early moon, crescent as a fingernail, snagged in the silk of the still-pale sky. Barely dawn, when these sisters enter the wood with their snail buckets.