~
At night, my husband takes it off
puts it on the dresser beside his wallet and keys
laying down, for a moment, the accoutrements of manhood.
—From "The Watch," a poem by Danusha Laméris, The American Poetry Review, Volume 45, Number 06 (November/December 2016) and Best American Poetry 2017.
That he wrote it with his hand and folded the paper
and slipped it into the envelope and sealed it with his tongue
and pressed it closed so I might open it with my fingers.
—From "The Letter, 1968," a poem by Marie Howe, The New Yorker (March 21, 2022), p. 59.
He arrived bundled up in a winter coat.
He put his suitcase down at my feet and pulled off his hat. Western face. Dark eyes. Hair combed to one side. He looked straight through me, without seeing me. Somewhat impatiently, he asked me in English if he could stay for a few days while he looked around for something else. I gave him a registration form to fill in. He handed me his passport so I could do it for him. Yan Kerrand, 1968, from Granville. A Frenchman. He seemed younger than in the photo, his cheeks less hollow. I held out my pencil for him to sign and he took a pen from his coat.
—From Winter in Sokcho, a novel by Elisa Shua Dusapin, translated from the French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins (Open Letter, 2021). It was first published in French in 2016 as Hiver à Sokcho and is now available in several other languages. The first edition in English in the United Kingdom was published by Daunt Books (2020).
I was no stranger to the single engine. My stepfather Mike had rented planes when I was growing up, and, with my mother, flew to some of the medical meetings where he gave lectures. Sometimes I was in the back with the luggage. My mother had taken enough flying lessons to know how to land should she be called upon to do so. She went so far as to solo, but then quit before she got her license. When we moved to the country outside of Nashville, Mike bought a tiny bright-red helicopter which he flew for years. He kept it in a hangar in the front of the farm where we lived.
—From "Flight Plan," an essay by Ann Patchett, in her collection These Precious Days (HarperCollins, 2021). This essay begins on page 91 of the hardcover.
When he got to his own house, William Wallace saw to his surprise that it had not rained at all. But there, curved over the roof, was something he had never seen before as long as he could remember, a rainbow at night. In the light of the moon, which had risen again, it looked small and of gauzy material, like a lady’s summer dress, a faint veil through which the stars showed.
—From "The Wide Net," a short story by Eudora Welty, in Selected Stories of Eudora Welty , containing all of A Curtain of Green and Other Stories and The Wide Net and Other Stories (The Modern Library/Random House, 1943). This segment is from page 70 of the second half of the book. I was inspired to pick it back up again after reading one of Ann Patchett's essays in These Precious Days, "Eudora Welty, an Introduction," pp. 85-90.