Bea walks into the classroom wearing the clothes she had on the day before. The Teacher understands that this is going to be a bad day. Bea’s hair is uncombed, face unwashed. She arrives precisely twelve seconds late. Not so late that the Teacher has to make a big deal about it. But not on time. Bea walks like a prisoner forcibly escorted, snatching herself along, step by step, then pouring her thin body into the seat. She has no books, no pencil or paper. She drapes herself over the desk and waits for the Teacher to continue or challenge.

Pauline had forgotten about the straw seats on the train. She had a half-hour’s ride from Newark to the Hoboken ferry terminal, and the moment she took her seat she was attacked through

I moved to Los Angeles to sing. When was this? August? June? I was twenty-nine, and those were shapeless months, when the days blended together and I refused to pull them apart.

My landlord was unusually close to her adult son. His name was Jeffrey, and my landlord said he was around my age. I’d never met him even though his apartment was apparently only twelve minutes away. I lived on the bottom floor of her dilapidated duplex; she lived upstairs. Every night I’d fall asleep to the sound of her feet shuffling across the thin wood floor above me.

I slept with my bedroom windows open, hoping for a breeze to carry in the burned-air smell of the city. Instead, my landlord would wake me up in the morning by pulling aside my curtain and thrusting her hand inside my room, offering me a gift—a spare tomato or a pamphlet about the Hare Krishnas.

Used to be, I was always saying, This doesn’t count. I lived my life in secret, like if nobody saw, I didn’t really have it. I was barely there. I wouldn’t admit to a thing. Now I know that what humans observe

I wonder what we looked like then, that day we drove over into California. My mother could probably still tell you what we wore.

They all knew him although no one in Bałtów spoke to him and he spoke to no one.

My father was not really an unusual man but he was, after all, more than eighty years old. My wife and I had to learn to live with the various problems of having him around and with his little eccentricities, brought on by his age. But we did just that, and without too much difficulty. Or so we thought. And then it happened.

It was raining as they drove out of Tacoma that morning. When the first car appeared he could see it from a long way off, dragging a cloud of mist like a parachute, and when it passed he touched the wipers to clear

The Verbal Metrics Department filled a single corridor of Building M, a squat Bauhaus knockoff with one glass face that presided over the northwest corner of 275 acres of former farmland that everyone at the Scholastic Achievement Service referred to as a “campus.” 

That night, lying by the fire under a set of stars that looked so fresh and clean they could have been minted that morning, in the chilly air that carried on its sleek back the sounds of nightbirds and the splash of fish —maybe this far south a gator tail —I watched the two of them sitting across from me, as Frank, snugged behind her broad shoulders, combed out Hazel’s hair with slow, gentle strokes.