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Very early one Tuesday morning in March—I remember it was still dark, and there were three nurses waiting for a bus on the corner—I came in from the bone-snapping cold to find several lights on and the apartment warm. It surprised me to find Harry home, and awake, since lately he had taken to spending almost every night at Kim's, over on Beacon, and I was even more surprised that he had turned on the steam heat. Out of Harry's chronic tightfistedness—we were responsible for half of the heating bill—and some perverse impulse of mine to test our seven years' friendship, we had at some point during December made a tacit pact never to open the radiators, and ever since we had been going around the house in our ski caps and down coats, exhaling puffs of vapor in the frigid bathroom and wearing gloves to cook dinner; the clouds of steam produced by the act of dumping a boiling pot of spaghetti into a colander in the sink were thick and billowing. It was a kind of dare, to see who would succumb first to the cold, but it did not please me to discover that I had won. Something was the matter with Harry.
—From "Millionaires," a short story by Michael Chabon, from his collection A Model World and Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 105-127. The segment here is from pages 106-107. The collection was first published in hardcover by Avon in 1992. This particular story first appeared in The New Yorker, Issue 197 (January 29, 1990). If you have a subscription to The New Yorker, you can sign in and read "Millionaires" in a flipbook from the archive. The story starts on page 32 of the issue from January 29, 1990.
Night. The kid's asleep. I keep up my defences, though every now and then my daughter delivers a new blow: just before New Year—I'll never forget this—Tima and I were planning to spend it at home, as usual no one had invited us anywhere, we went to the Christmas tree market and gathered up a bouquet of the bushiest fan-shaped branches, just like a tree! Then we made some little flags and animals out of coloured paper from old magazines, and at that point Alyona shows up, supposedly to wish us a happy New Year; she'd bought Tima a blue plastic cat of surpassing ugliness but Tima made a great fuss of it, tucked it up in bed, and I didn't tell the poor child that his own mother, completely brazen, had stolen from her own family home two boxes of Christmas tree decorations, leaving us only three. I wept.
—From The Time: Night, a short novel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, translated from the Russian by Sally Laird (Northwestern University Press, 2000). Originally published in Russian in Novy Mir, No. 2, 1992. First published in English by Pantheon Books, New York, and and Virago Press Limited, London. This segment is from page 30.
Once, on the train, an Afghan woman who had never seen Afghanistan said to me, "Triumph is possible." Is that a prophecy? I wanted to ask. But my Persian was straight from a beginner’s textbook and she looked, while listening to me, as though she were picking through a wardrobe whose owner had died in a fire.
—From "A Celebration," a prose poem by Iman Mersal, translated from the Arabic by Robyn Creswell, The Paris Review, Issue 197 (Summer 2011).
I have abstained from grief these past days.
Now the rain approaches like a slow train,
summer in its carriage. . . .
—From "Not in Matter," a poem by James Harmon Clinton, The Decadent Review.
As I eat my lunch, you talk, with gusto, about hunger. When I complain about my unfashionable clothes, you laugh remembering your wedding—you borrowed a white robe from a nurse to wear as a wedding dress. When I beg for privacy, you ask: "Did I tell you about the day the Bolsheviks came to take the roof off our farmhouse?" Or worse: "Did I tell you about the house where my mother died right after sending my brothers and me to an orphanage?" "Did I tell you about how Uncle Kazik died?" "Did I tell you how the Soviets took my father twice, and since he did return after the first time, I didn't cry a bit when they took him the second time?"
—From "Baba Bronya," a prose poem by Valzhyna Mort, from her collection Music for the Dead and Resurrected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020). This poem appears on pages 52-57 of the hardcover.