When their time finally comes, there are secrets they will carry with them to their funeral pyres and their graves. They are all the small, vitally important things that no one will ever know. These are the best things about them, and the way they lived. Cigarettes smoked on the fire escape of their first… Read more »

I am learning what it means to be a human being. It is such a strange thing?crude and clumsy and strangely beautiful. Always, I am learning to put one foot in front of the other, always picking myself up and starting again. I am walking into doors and stepping on feet. I am learning how… Read more »

Actually, sir, It’s Jenkins. Wharton sits in the cubicle beside me. Thank you, yes, I am settling in quite well. It’s been 12 years now, so I’m getting fairly familiar with where everything is. What’s that, sir? What do I feel my strengths are as an employee? You’re certainly taking this in a novel direction,… Read more »

When you build your house, be sure to build it well. As with all important undertakings, begin with a sense of purpose, and with hope in your heart. Draw the designs on your lover’s back with a feather pen. Collect the best tools you can find, and sharpen them all with a sense of wonder…. Read more »

You . . . were sitting on the edge of the bed we once shared, combing your hair in the mirror. You were staring at yourself, past yourself, past the reflection of me. I . . . was moving backwards in the darkness of the landing, drifting backwards down the stairs, floating backwards into the… Read more »

Health Ms. Allen shows us a video of what it looks like when bad cells divide. There are posters of smokers? lungs and classroom rules. We make collages of cancer symptoms. Math Outside the window thin, dark branches of unidentifiable autumn trees are being whipped around by a wicked north wind. A car is reversing… Read more »

So there’s this man who finds himself middle-aged, middle class, middle-of-the-road, living in the middle of Middle America. He knows his place, his way, his precise location, because he has GPS and satellite signals, and echolocation. He has route maps and instructions. He has a glowing box of dreams he keeps in the corner of… Read more »

When she was a girl, she would sit on her mother’s lap and imagine the pages of books were windows opening onto a world where she could feel as free as in her dreams. It was a place of transformations. Wolves walked and talked like men. Women breathed beneath the waves. There was a time,… Read more »

There’s this great scene in Woody Allen’s film Manhattan where his character, Isaac, lists some of the things that, for him, make life worth living. He talks about Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, Flaubert, Louis Armstrong’s ?Potato Head Blues,? The Jupiter Symphony, and ?those incredible apples and pears by Cézanne.? Whenever I find myself bogged down… Read more »

Whether he met his end through mischief or dementia is anybody’s guess. I suppose we shouldn’t really have been surprised. After all, he spent so much of the time off in his own little world, anyway. It was as though he was, at any moment, on the verge of disappearing. Always staring out the window,… Read more »