AB Intra

Maybe she was still in town, in her own place, in Brooklyn, maybe she was lucky too. Maybe she didn’t love him at all, maybe she just liked his apartment. Location, location, location. —fitch

But Mitsuko knew that where pleasure is impossible, intensity of response can be made to substitute. And so, a good Jewish wife, she had sifted out a fragment of the apocalyptic past and made a gift of that. Their shared, pious grief. —gelernter

A

nyway, if she were going to leave LA, Val wanted to go to Rome. The American century was drawing to a close, and she wanted to see how others had made the transition gracefully. Italians made great movies, wore great clothes, ate great food. What did they care that the glory days were behind them? —Lefer

I

 had been saving my money for something like this. I still drove my 2004 Honda Accord, still lived in a rent-controlled apartment, still celebrated my kids’ birthdays at the park instead of Inflation, the local bouncy house rental. The prices at that place were always going up. —chen

M

issoula was a silly town, full of people who had meant to do one thing but were pulled toward another. This was the West, and a town of drifting. She could drift! She’d never tried it before. —Dunnington

I

remember these days as some of the happiest of my life. It wasn’t just the expansion of my personal library, which at the time mostly consisted of yellowed Signet classics, it was the feeling that literature was enveloping me, that every book I brought home was an invitation to a world I wanted desperately to join. —Montoya

S

ome petitioners would be here until two a.m., but the Holy Ghost was running the altar like a table in Las Vegas. Speaking in tongues, it was wonderful to have no thoughts, and ask for nothing, and have no idea what you were saying. It was blissful. —Huffey

O

ther days we patrolled the forest in groups, seeking out escapees. Wishing to clear my head, and against regulations, I took forest walks by myself sometimes, collecting wild berries and mushrooms. There is a presence in the forest that is strongest when one is alone, something that eludes definition. —Warner

W

ell, auf wiedersehen, Karl, the smoke is already in my eyes. I know that you’ll know just how many atoms of carbon and nitrogen there are in the smoke gliding up my nasal passages right now. I’ll bring you all the information I can! —Harrison

M

aybe (probably not, but maybe) it was just another leafy American town — a town in which an immigrant machinist who’d survived the camps could afford a down payment if he knew how to scrimp, if he had a stable job at a machine shop, if he could get a loan, if he was white. —Duraj

T

he drawing is to be a birthday present. It’s a blind contour. That means Rainey can’t look away from the model, nor lift her pen from the page. In other words, the artist must trust her eyes. —Landis

W

as John Fante seeing into the future? Or is it simply the poetic and historic fact that past is prelude? For in the United States today identical atrocities and worse are being perpetrated by masked government thugs snatching people off the street, out of children’s daycare centers, from bedrooms and into the unknown, all in the name of Making America Great Again. —Cooper