But then I started to drink with strangers
by Flávia Monteiro
Sao Paulo, 08:40 PM, Sagarana Bar.
“Do you believe we are living in the Anthropocene?” asks the white-haired guy sitting next to me at the bar on this warm weekday evening. I’ve never seen him before in my life, and this is only the third sentence we’ve exchanged — the previous ones being unremarkable comments on the beer and the weather.
How to Break Even
by Kristen Millares Young
I lost my best friend a few years ago.
It was unexpected.
I know what you’re thinking.
No, she didn’t die, but our friendship did.
I thought we would become old in each other’s company.
We used to talk about it.
Sittin’ in the Back of My Memory: My Father and His Musical Commandments
by Genevieve Sachs
While I was growing up, my Jewish father could barely keep track of Hanukkah. When he would remember, the holiday would most likely be halfway through already and we probably wouldn’t have any candles. Therefore, at my mother’s behest and my father’s defenseless surrender, I landed in Catholic School, enduring plaid skirts and mass twice a week for the first thirteen years of my life. However my dad, Lloyd, was the one who passed down the religion that stuck. Not Judaism—although I definitely have his nose—but the religion instilled by growing up under a music critic’s roof.
Have you ever seen a ghost? Or heard one? Maybe not. But perhaps you’ve had some experience or other you couldn’t easily explain, some weird occurrence which you mull on even now. Did it happen the way you remember? Or did you imagine it? That ambiguity, unfocused and inconclusive, is the essence of what we think of as the supernatural.
Ode to the Queen of Strays
Beth O’Halloran
I am in the emergency vet – the pricey one based in a university, where the not-yet-vets get to earn their chops. I’m thinking about chops because at my feet is a cat carrier with a wildling of a cat in it. Last night, I found her in my kitchen under a chair with her mouth hanging open above a pool of drool and a blinked-back look of pain on her face. It was 1 a.m. I was ready for bed. My children were at their father’s, sleeping in a house I’ve never seen. I had once again fallen asleep watching TV and was preparing for the usual light switching and door locking. But then there was a cat that did not look at all right in my kitchen. I put out a saucer of milk. It lapped. I tried some cheese, thinking, hoping, an appetite might mean it was not dying a painful, poisoned death. She let me rub her forehead. Now I really have to worry about this cat. But she managed to gum the cheese.
Fishing, Painting, Fireflies, and Metaphor
by Alex DiFrancesco
It was about a decade ago, and a romantic partner and I were driving back to New York City from the Catskill Mountains. My partner at the time’s name was Oscar, he was about twenty years older than me, and owned a cabin and some property at the top of a mountain upstate. We’d spent the weekend there, and on Sunday night, we were driving back into the city, down the highway, with WNYC on the car radio. We were mostly quiet, Oscar focused on the road in front of us, and me drifting in and out of thought, tired from hiking, happy to be in a heated car and headed back to Astoria, Queens, where we both lived. In the quiet, a song started playing through the car’s speakers. It was jazz — jazz is something I’ve always appreciated, but never been deeply into — but it was a totally different kind of jazz than I’d heard before. There was something joyful and a different kind of wild about it, something I responded to by immediately leaning forward and turning it up.
My author copies of The Bridge arrived today. My new puppy Eleanor barked as I opened the boxes, in either fear or excitement. The book sits on the desk as I write this. My fourth book and third novel, this time it is an out-of-body experience. Previous books arrived in similar boxes and it was euphoric, terrifying, victorious, or any happy-dance-air-punching combination of the above. But this time it’s different. I look at The Bridge and it looks back and me and any minute one of us is going to say, “Wait. Do I know you?”
Salchow and Seminoma
by Logan Davis
I was treated for cancer at the age of 23. Not the kind of cancer that could kill you, but the kind that takes a while to heal from, and destroys any semblance of trust in your body. The thing I was principally grieving at that time was any possibility of living the first half of my twenties being bad at dancing, getting a little too drunk with friends, and knowing my body would recover by the time I went to sleep the next day. I innately trusted my body, and I knew after this that I couldn’t.