~
I'd been at the apartment for two months when Agnes wrote that she was coming.
I heard her from the bedroom late one evening. The door in the hallway opened and closed. She didn't call out to me before going up to the studio.
The following day as I was leaving for the library, I ran into her on the building stairs. She was tall and pleasingly thin. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt, opening up into an elegant ruffle on one side of her waist, at once striking and casual. Her shoes resembled royal slippers and were the same soft shade of green as her trousers. She may have been on her way to the opera or to a bookshop and would have been comfortable in either place. She wore no ornaments, except for a rectangular gray stone ring on one finger, which I noticed when she extended her hand.
"You must be our tenant," she said. "Finally, we meet."
She enunciated each word, as if she were reading aloud from a book.
—From White on White, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2021). This section is from page 14 of the hardcover.
This is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
"I hope there’s no afterlife," he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. "I hope he's not watching over me."
I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn't think it could be the dog.
—From "One Sun Only," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (March 7, 2022), pp. 58-64.
Nightly, the smoke from the neighbor's incinerator pawed the air
in our garden. Black flecks of newspaper settled
across the violets. . . .
—From "Nightfall in Spring," a poem by Chloe Honum, from her collection The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022), p. 9. My other favorite from this collection of poems was the one that inspired me to buy the book in the first place: "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California" (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). It appeared on page 46 of The Lantern Room. Many of the poems from this book previously appeared in her chapbook Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017). Honum is also the author of The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). That book's cover, which I find really astonishing, features a photograph of this piece of artwork: Bust (Impression), life size: 17" x 21.5" x 13", 2005, cast glass, by Karen LaMonte.