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It’ll happen like this: You will scrape the ice off the windshield. Slow, at first, carefully. You will shovel the snow into neat little piles for your kids to scavenge for snowmen after school. You will climb into the mid-size SUV, silver,and wring out your dripping wet jeans. You will turn the key but the car won’t start. The car won’t start. You will sigh, and sit back, and sigh. You will sit for a long time. You will think about the failures that preceded this one and the minor destinies that led you to this episode of the multiverse. You’ll think about your wife, 29, blonde hair, brown eyes, five-foot-five in her kitten…
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by Meg Freitag I have loved. I haveLoved like someone leavingAll the lights on All night long. Like even the white cottonSun was stuck at its cruxAbove the houses, perpetually Swabbing the iodine sky,And no one the whole world overSlept for four years. I have loved Like being very small, swimming In a saucer of warm milk, with no eyes.I have loved like a glass Of water on the bedside tableWith no water in it.I have loved like a ghost Wearing a bedsheetGhost costume, as a disguise. Last weekThere was still a buoyant spot On the wall, from the faceOf his…
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by Travis Baldree 4/5 This was one of the coziest fantasies I’ve read in a long time. If I’d managed to time my reading to be more in tune with the seasons, I would have saved this for the middle of winter. It’s as warm and comforting as one of the cups of coffee served at the books’ namesake fictional cafe. As far as fantasies go, I thought this was incredibly accessible. There’s not much mental labor required to make sense of the worldbuilding, and the coffee shop that the main narrative focuses on is similar enough to a real…
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The room is painted blue. The wooden bed frame, the quilt, the sheets, the nightstand, the lamp, the doorknobs, the window panes, the slippers by the bed. All blue. She remembers the color before she remembers her own name. Blue. Then, Clara. Is that her name? No, someone else’s. She looks at her reflection in the mirror. No, Clara is someone else. There is a knock on the bedroom door, and the door swings open. A man with a swirled mustache, wearing an early-20th-century butler’s uniform, stands in the doorway, holding a silver tray. “May I come in?” he says.…
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by Wisława Symborska They say I looked back out of curiosity,but I could have had other reasons.I looked back mourning my silver bowl. Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.So I wouldn’t have to keep staring at the righteous napeof my husband Lot’s neck.From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead he wouldn’t so much as hesitate.From the disobedience of the meek.Checking for pursuers.Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.I felt age within me. Distance.The futility of wandering. Torpor.I looked back setting my bundle down.I looked back not knowing where to…
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by Alexandra Tanner 2/5 This book was interesting and well-written—it just wasn’t really my thing. It follows two sisters in New York City as they navigate situationships, new jobs, and the complexities of mental health. This would be great for fans of novels like Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. Worry is more character-driven than plot-driven (it doesn’t have a defined plot at all), which I sometimes enjoy, but it just didn’t work for me this time. I found the main character to be whiny, self-involved, and mean. She did not grow or change in any recognizable way by…
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“Does your mother know you drive like that?” You were angry and I was mortified. He was younger than I am now, blonde, in a black leather jacket some student would scavenge for seven bucks at the thrift store ten years later, skid marks and all. In my memory, he smirks, or maybe that was you. I like to think of you, still, as the foreteller of men’s stupidity, shaking your head while you speak as if you know the decision is already set. Any support to the opposition is merely a matter of liability. You asked for his name, remember?You told him you knew his mother (you didn’t) and she would…
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by Mary Oliver When death comeslike the hungry bear in autumn;when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;when death comeslike the measle-pox; when death comeslike an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everythingas a brotherhood and a sisterhood,and I look upon time as no more than an idea,and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower,…
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by Adam Ehrlich Sachs 5/5 Here is the whimsy I have been looking for! Gretel and the Great War has one of the most unique structures I’ve ever come across. The stories are organized from A to Z, with each story centering on a character whose title corresponds with the story’s letter (A is about the architect, C is about the choreographer, etc.). The way the stories connect with one another—ambiguously, at first, then more and more clearly with every new character that’s introduced—is brilliant. It makes the novel feel more like a puzzle than a book. I feel like…
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by Emily Jungmin Yoon First, there was the horse. Imagine creatures as majestic,standing. All their lives they stand, withholding. Imagine being tamed. Learning to be still,to be speed. Imagine birds as large as horses. We would be flying, grabbinga majestic creature by its collar. In cylinders of metal, we are four-leggedbeast-lives of liminal spaces. One time I was so tired of flying I wonderedif I will spend all my life packing then unpacking. A complaint of privilege. We are such spendingcreatures. And when I say we are beasts, is that a metaphor? Metaphor, according to Papastergiadis,is also transportation, between absence…
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Emily Vance Brown 