In photography class, you had learned to control your breathing, to narrow your focus and attention and direct it at one external object outside of you.
My father and his younger brother tried to make me a man by forcing me to learn how to fish. Towards the end of my fourteenth winter, as soon as the lake thawed, my father wanted his father to begin training me.
I don’t believe that I will ever like Michelle, even though I love who she is when she is my brother. I want to accept the arrangement, but I am still having trouble processing the fact that the person I rely on is not him.
I speak to my leg hair as I would speak to myself. Which is to say: with suspicion. Which is to say: with one ear trained to the sounds of a door opening and closing.
No doubt the reason we knew the animals so well was because my father was a vet, and so his life and our livelihood were fundamentally entangled with the lives of other creatures.
Hamish was overwhelmed by the intensity...as if everything had been assembled just so, just right, in that moment for the two of them, coming around the corner.
He wasn’t sure when she began mentioning the curse. Later, when he looked back, he realized she’d said the word with alarming frequency since his arrival, spoken with the naturalness of words like bread and bicycle.
People kept telling him how good he was. They spoke about his fluidity, his ease in the role. All this fuss surprised him. There was no trick, he thought. You just had to believe it.
I had every right to inhabit a space. If I were in Madrid to simply drink and eat and wander the city, I should be able to do so without being accused of mediocrity by the locals.
No one knew where the FTs came from. Like the basketball that hit you in the nose out of nowhere, they just materialized in front of us and walked into our life with their long legs.
Everyone joked about how the two brothers’ names had become their destinies. Sihai, four oceans. A man forever moving. Weijia, settle down. A man who makes a home.
Everything is suspended, and into the void steps a powerful curiosity which draws them out of the bedroom and downstairs to see the truth of it for themselves.
Once she spied Ellen in front of her computer, dancing. It was the most beautiful thing, the way her arms snaked as if they were channeling some old poetry.
A middle-aged woman at the front desk yelled: Welcome to the new dimension! Her uniform was tight but also disheveled. Her eyelids were lacquered in turquoise shadow.
"We wear masks anytime we leave the apartment. We order groceries and pay the motoboys big tips. We both suspended our private practices. Botox is not an essential service, though my patients would disagree."
Mal wanted to prove she was more than a thirty-year-old podcaster and obscure short-story writer living in her mother’s garage apartment gobbling mango lassi and Doritos.
The golden dome of the loaf soared higher than the roof of the house. The arms of the trees stretched, as if animated by actual will, and brushed the crusty top with their leafy fingers.
My dad and I don’t know what to say to each other, or how to cut through the choking weight of the day, or where to begin with the information. So, one day we decide to book a flight and go to the Daintree—to bird-watch.
They had sat there with all their worthy feelings about Zariyah Zhadan’s poetry, perversely enjoying the disruption of the recital by a finger circling the rim of a wine glass.
They kissed because they wanted to, because no one could see them, because they could barely see each other, because their mouths were better off without words.
“We didn’t have sex then.” Luisa paused. “I just…made it up.” She kissed her sister’s shoulder through the cloth of her nightgown. A relief invaded Amaia; the force of it embarrassed her slightly.
This whole idea, combined with the world “nuchal”—it made me hate Kay even more. I imagined her as this hunchbacked, creeping thing with a big bag of fluid on the back of her neck like a goiter.
But it took three months before she was ready to block Graham. She trembled as she prepared to do it, too, because she had just discovered she was pregnant.
You tunneled into reason: that many earthlings you had observed had enjoyed ecstatic many moments already where they had relaxed into the comfort of being invisible.
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