“I thought about how I used to sleep on Gladewood Street with the passing trains at night. It reminded me of the boy who lived even closer to the tracks than I did, whose name I couldn’t remember.”
I told the army that my father was abusing my mother and that I had to stay home to protect her. This girl whose job it was to check out these kinds of things arrived at our apartment. It was … Read More
Until the February of his eleventh year, Joseph Cohen felt an inordinate kind of sympathy for all earthly things he encountered, even—and in some moods, especially—for inanimate objects.
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.
He’s compact, twenty-five, staring at a line of mathematical notation on a whiteboard. He’s in a mostly undecorated, windowless office alone. He rakes his fingers through his hair and rubs the back of his neck. The air is humid and … Read More
The first stone was one I knew. Flaking and grey and dusty. A driveway stone – from my driveway. Who breaks a person’s dining room window with a stone from that same person’s driveway?
“At the top of the platform I turned left. The flat surface of the hemispheric bubble sprawled below. In my memory, the red chairs looked like rock candy.”
