Chapter 17
It’s that feeling that everything is so good that you try to think back to earlier that day to where you missed something. Because you must have missed something for you to feel this good. I try to explain this stuff to Butler and get no reaction. It’s another thing I can’t articulate well.
In our morning reading: thoughts on fiction by Sofia Samatar and Rita Bullwinkel, the appeal of movie theaters, and more.
In our afternoon reading: interviews with Kelly Link and Justin Taylor, a Sun Ra tribute album, and more.
Steak and Potato
by Marin Kosut
I was born to vegetate. As a juvenile, I’d stare at my blank bedroom wall. I’d stare out at the driveway. Not even the sky or the ceiling. I’d lay on my bed looking down at the middle of my body and stay outside myself inside the house. I wrinkled with time on top of my sheets. Sometimes, admittedly, I flipped through the Pennysaver. I didn’t know nothing, but I wasn’t totally rotten.
In our morning reading: exploring Emily Carroll’s comics, revisiting the work of Juan Rulfo, and more.
In our afternoon reading: Justin Taylor on writing his new novel, thoughts on Shabaka’s new album, and more.
In our morning reading: fiction by Juan Martinez, the endangered languages of New York City, and more.
The Traveling Mink Coat
by CAT Wyatt
My father, a military pilot during WWII, was on a training mission a month before Valentine’s Day, 1945. Urgently needing to find a present for my mother, he went into the town close to his training facility. He noticed a beautiful mink coat in a shop window, a luxurious full-length, mahogany-colored, sheared mink coat with a caramel-colored silk lining. The lining reminded him of my mother’s silky, taffy-blonde hair. After purchasing the coat, he waited while a seamstress embroidered my mother’s and his initials deep inside the left slit pocket. My father wrote a card and tucked it in the same pocket, knowing she was left-handed and always kept a handkerchief in her left coat pocket, knowing she would find the card and their initials.