“But then the Romans didn’t want paunchy, lumpy bodies in their villas (aside from their own), so they decapitated Sokrates, already green and moldy from the hemlock, and shoved his face alone in their alcoves, dressing him up in pure white marble.”
“The early afternoon lured more cars on the road. The drive to home because slower and slower. The air was dewy with heat and silence, and they all say boiling in the hot, stinking sun.”
She is a young woman in love. She had been a girl, who, at seven, danced with a handsome older cousin at a wedding, looking up at him with steady, curious eyes, wondering at the first blush of an attraction for which she didn’t yet know the name. She came to believe in love, as a boy might believe in heroism: as an occasion for both virtue and adventure.
“Dolores sat and wept in pain until the early hours of the morning. With what strength she had after her shock, she dragged herself across the room, pulling herself through shattered glass from family portraits and the scattered contents of her nightstand drawers.”
The grass is trimmed like my father obsesses over. It’s green as Heineken bottles, as my mother’s eyes when shining with tears, and the white lines that frame it up and down stand out like Claire’s porcelain skin at Ricky’s son’s baptism.
Philadelphia, 1962. “Dirty beatnik,” he muttered under his breath. Maurice Povich sat with his roommate on the balcony outside his dorm at the University of Pennsylvania. It was the night before graduation, and Al decided to light up a joint. … Read More
Before, she had felt as though of the night as a separate space—a sealed pocket of her life—but now she was reminded that everything that existed around the pool at daytime still stood by at night: the black hardtop of the basketball court, a racquetball wall, and the town Rec Center itself, a building which tomorrow would reveal to be little more than a grey dome without windows.
