My boyfriend doesn’t really drink but he loves bars. He likes talking to strangers (he’s a sales executive) and he likes talking to strangers at bars; I hate talking to strangers but I like listening, and I like listening to him do it, how...
They started making their annual sojourn to Big Sur the same year they met at Chevron, not pumping gas, but getting buttoned up every morning to put their chemical-engineering degrees to good use at the refinery in Richmond, the one that...
When I left Anhui for Shanghai, at the innocent age of seventeen, the recruiter told me that the theme of the hotel where I was going to work was “rustic farm life.”
One December 24, Superstorm Mindy came in from the Atlantic and walloped America. Nowhere got it worse than New York City. That Christmas Eve day, Louise Wexler had planned to ride public transit all the way from her apartment in...
Holland spent Wednesday building a privacy fence for a tiresome academic couple in Barton Hills. Pressure-treated posts, horizontal cedar boards, stained and sealed, it was his third that week.
I didn’t recognize you when I saw you because you looked exactly the same as you did in 2017 and it was absurd that you wouldn’t have changed at all. I assumed you were someone from outside of my life until your forehead turned red like it...
As a child I often woke up next to her in her bed, somehow teleported there during the night. I’d lie very still and watch car-light shadows rove from wall to ceiling to wall. She snored with grinding constancy, as if some terrible snarl...
