Fiction by Etgar Keret, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Maki Kashimada; an essay by David Sedaris; and three poems

~

Summers spent practicing in the apartment

stairwell: hand on the bannister, one foot after

another. Did I ever tell you I couldn't walk

until I was three and then sort of dragged

myself up and downstairs until I was seven

or eight? . . . 

—From "Achingly Beautiful How the Sky Blooms Umber at the End of the Day, Through the Canopy," a poem by Gabrielle Calvocoressi (Poem-a-Day, June 15, 2015, Academy of American Poets). 

SAD COW

A. had a recurring dream. He dreamed it almost every night, but in the morning, when Goodman or one of the instructors woke him and asked if he remembered what he had dreamed, he was always quick to say no. This wasn't because the dream was scary or embarrassing, it was just a stupid dream in which he was standing on top of a grassy hill beside an easel, painting the pastoral landscape in watercolors. The landscape in the dream was breathtaking, and since A. had come to the institution as a baby, the grassy hill was probably an imaginary place he had thought up or a real place he had seen in a picture or short film in one of his classes. The only thing that kept the dream from being completely pleasant was a huge cow with human eyes that was always grazing right next to A.'s easel.

—From "Tabula Rasa," a short story by Etgar Keret. It appeared (pp. 29-44) in his story collection Fly Already, which was translated into English by Sondra Silverston, Nathan Englander, Jessica Cohen, Miriam Shlesinger, and Yardenne Greenspan (Riverhead Books, 2019). The collection was originally published in Hebrew, in somewhat different form, as A Glitch at the Edge of the Galaxy (Kinneret Zmora-Bitan Dvir, 2018). "Tabula Rasa" was first published in English as "A.: Only Through Death Will You Learn Your True Identity" in a Fiction Issue of Wired (December 13, 2016).

The room's a bit dark, the lights are off. The heat feels excessive even though in general I tend to prefer the heat. I start to take off my jacket and scarf right away. There's just one other patient waiting, another woman trapped with me in that room. She looks about twenty years older than I am. She watches me carefully, without warmth in her eyes. Her gaze is impenetrable. I can't manage to remove the scarf, it's gotten tangled up with my necklace. How ridiculous. The woman keeps looking at me as if there were a screen between us, as if I were a person on television.

—From Whereabouts, a novel by Jhumpa Lahiri (Knopf, 2021). The book was originally written and published in Italian as Dove Mi Trovo (Milan, Italy: Ugo Guanda Editore S.r.l., 2018) and translated into English by the author. This section is from page 20 of the hardcover.

Taichi, however, was unaware of her thoughts. Having boarded the bullet train, his four bad limbs bumped against the seats here and there, until finally he came to the one designated on his ticket and sat down with a plump. If he were anyone else, his failure to show reserve with respect to his disability might, far from engendering sympathy, have invited nothing short of annoyed frowns. But he was oblivious to that kind of unreasonableness. He merely beckoned to her from his seat, as if his having found it by himself were some kind of great achievement. 

—From Touring the Land of the Dead, a novella by Maki Kashimada, translated from the Japanese by Haydn Trowell (Europa Editions, 2021). Also included in the book is a second novella, Ninety-Nine Kisses. The pair were originally published in Japanese as Meido Meguri; 99 no seppun (Tokyo, Japan: Kawade Shobo Shinsha Ltd. Publishers, 2012).

My sister is not dating anyone—a good thing, as she’s got way too much time on her hands. And that, I think, is the No. 1 reason so many relationships fail. Too much free time, and too much time together. I’m normally away from Hugh between four and six months a year, and when the pandemic cancelled the tours I had scheduled I panicked. We were in New York at the time, so I sought out his old friend Carol. “What’s he really like?” I asked her. “I think I sort of knew once, but that was twenty-five years ago.”
—From "Pearls," an essay by David Sedaris, The New Yorker (May 17, 2021), pp. 20-22. 

Slowly the great birds rise into the soft golden air above the village.

—From "The Great Birds," a poem by Kenneth Patchen, Poetry (May 1955).

It is 1992. Weekends, we paw at cheap
silverware at yard sales.
—From "Naturalization," a poem by Jenny Xie (Poem-a-Day, August 28, 2017, Academy of American Poets).