…You’re a good worker.” He doesn’t say anything. I go back to work reading the memory scans, but I can’t find anything about Battleship, or about something called a Donny and Marie lunchbox, or about something called Free Parking that led to broken friendships among the interviewees. I told Krista that you got five hundred bucks when you landed on… [Read More]

…the DVDs and the personal lubricants—and her eyes, enlarged by a pair of 2.5 reading glasses, also snatched, had a slight craziness to them. The mother, being barely nineteen and therefore undaunted by celebrity or craziness, tilted her head at Margaux and asked her again, “Is there someone I can get?” even as her baby was being carried off. Margaux… [Read More]

…You only have one year before these places are demolished, after which point the voices inside migrate or altogether disappear.   8. Search for these voices in prestigious libraries. Study death to prepare for death. Study time to conquer time. Understand that eternity belongs to those who live in the present (Wittgenstein). Parameter: This search costs upwards of $200,000. Reading… [Read More]

…other families that had endured the same kind of grief we had long buried. After two months of intense research and reading, I was left with a sense of malaise. I had trouble concentrating at work and snapped at coworkers. I was impatient with my husband. I was filled with questions that could never be answered by newspaper articles or… [Read More]

…at her side within seconds. Her eyes began to move rapidly, blinking fast. Brian shouted for the doctor, and Dr. Goldberg was there instantly. She started reading the monitor while taking Margie’s pulse. Pablo kept his eyes on Margie. Something was happening. The monitor began to beep rapidly and then even more rapidly. Margie’s eyes struggled to open. “Margie? Anak?”… [Read More]

…through the gamut of unlikely situations ending with this night becoming a love story. When he leaves the bathroom, he expects Rita to be doubled over in nausea, either from the chemo or the company. But she has laid out her notebook and pens on his coffee table, has put on her reading glasses, and is scratching her bald head,… [Read More]

The names of orbits, the names of Uncles, the names of plants all memorized or gathered or buried with the seeds. I have never grown weary of reading the labels of spices, ingredients of a potion, desert trees. Never grown tired of counting the seconds between lightning and its boom, the gongs of the big clock as it adds the… [Read More]

…good job of keeping up with music. In general, I’ve always ended up listening to whatever the guy I’m with is listening to, which is not so much an identity thing as it is a laziness thing. It takes a lot of time to keep up with music, and I’d rather be watching Law and Order or reading or napping…. [Read More]

…blue and a sun glinting gold off the spread wings of the airplanes, “is a very great artist.” — *Loosely inspired by the true story of Paul Heller, a Jewish prisoner of Buchenwald who gave Edward Murrow a tour of the camp, as recounted in Caroline Heller’s Reading Claudius: A Memoir in Two Parts (New York: The Dial Press, 2015)…. [Read More]

…home shelters Alzheimer’s patients, who tend to wander. A resident might follow a departing visitor out the locked doors, then make her way onto the grounds of the adjacent residential community and along a country road. “Dr. Hunt” must be code: a way to initiate a search without causing alarm. Still, I loved my mistaken reading, and until my last… [Read More]