~
I went to hear a man give a talk. The event was held on a college campus. The man was a professor, but he taught at a different school, in another part of the country. He was a well-known author, who, earlier that year, had won an international prize. But although the event was free and open to the public, the auditorium was only half full. I myself would not have been in the audience, I would not even have been in that town, had it not been for a coincidence. A friend of mine was being treated in a local hospital that specializes in treating her particular type of cancer. I had come to visit this friend, this very dear old friend whom I had not seen in several years, and whom, given the gravity of her illness, I might not see again.
It was the third week of September, 2017. I had booked a room through Airbnb. The host was a retired librarian, a widow. . . .
A cat had been promised, but I saw no sign of one. Only later, when it was time for me to leave, would I learn that, between my booking and my stay, the host's cat had died. She delivered this news brusquely, immediately changing the subject so that I couldn't ask her about it--which I was in fact going to do only because something in her manner made me think that she wanted to be asked about it. And it occurred to me that maybe it wasn't emotion that had made her change the subject like that but rather worry that I might later complain. Depressing host talked too much about dead cat. The sort of comment you saw on the site all the time.
--From What Are You Going Through, a novel by Sigrid Nunez (Riverhead Books, 2020). Nunez's previous book, The Friend, was a New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction.
We arrived at the Brancion-en-Chalon cemetery on August 15th, 1997. France was on holiday. All the locals had taken off. The birds that fly from grave to grave weren't flying anymore. The cats that stretch out between the potted plants had disappeared. It was even too warm for the ants and lizards; all the marble was burning hot. The gravediggers had the day off, as did the newly deceased. I wandered alone around the paths, reading the names of people I would never know. And yet I immediately felt good there. Where I belonged.
--From Fresh Water for Flowers, a novel by Valérie Perrin, translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle (Europa Editions, 2020). Originally published in French as Changer l'eau des fleurs (Editions Albin Michel: Paris, France, 2018). This segment is from page 17 in the hardcover version.
From the ditch behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut, where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees. "Colman!" she called, but he didn’t hear. She watched him swing the axe in a clean arc and thought that from this distance he could be any age. Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he'd been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn't known him then. He had already turned forty when they met.
It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter. Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes. "There's nothing wrong," she shouted when she was still some yards off. He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him. "Emer rang from London. She's coming home."
He put down the axe. "Home for a visit, or home for good?" He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls. On the floor inside, if floor was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil.
The year before, they'd found cavities in the author's wisdom teeth; they needed to come out. He could elect I.V. sedation ("twilight sedation") or just local anesthetic, as the dentist suggested. They'd taken a panoramic X-ray of his head, chin on a little stand while a camera whirred and clicked around him, and then scheduled the extractions for the following month, when the dentist was back from vacation. There was no rush. It would be a few days of unpleasantness, that's all. Let the office know twenty-four hours in advance if you want the I.V., said the receptionist, whose fingernails were painted with stars.
He learned from the Internet that the difference between twilight sedation and local anesthesia was not primarily a difference in the amount of pain but in the memory of it. The benzodiazepines calm you during the procedure, yes, but their main function is to erase your memory of whatever transpires: the dentist getting leverage, cracking, a sudden jet of blood. This helped explain why the people he asked were fuzzy regarding the details of their own extractions, often unsure if they'd been sedated or not.
That October his ruminations about twilight sedation dominated his walks with Liza. They would meet at Grand Army Plaza in the late afternoon and head into the Long Meadow of Prospect Park, then wander along the smaller trails as the light died in the trees. Finally, it was the last walk before he had to call if he wanted the I.V.
--From "
The Golden Vanity," a short story by Ben Lerner,
The New Yorker (June 18, 2012), pp. 66-73.
Do bees breathe?
I don't want to look it up.
I just want to believe
that you are a bee
and I am the poppy you rest in.
--From "
Exaltation," a poem by Lisa Allen Ortiz, Broadsided Press (August 1, 2019).
