AB Intra

I’d have to call my mom a couple times a day. She had closed ranks with me on the war and the draft. Actions she approved of, embraced. But not a trip like this. —Wirick

Was it the way we’ll speak, was that it, or the fridge, or the car, or the bank account, or what my father said, so long ago, the nickname I hated, but at least it was a nickname, and as such an attempt, however feeble, of what it was I longed for, never? —Ore

n Oswald Conspiracy Shift was applied in the grouped cases of Walter D. and Hanna K., producing a correlation >.87. Safe Harbor was therefore deemed unnecessary, although a Lamarckian Coefficient was nonetheless produced. —Moskowitz

ollowing her into the dentist’s office, I asked if she knew why rats were associated with betrayal. I wasn’t expecting a real answer, but thought she might find me more interesting for asking. In China, rats were symbols of prosperity, she said. If you have enough to attract rats, you have something. —conlon

always thought other parents looked genuinely energized by the presence of other people, but my father Christopher Harms seemed zapped of vital essence by the opposite electric charge of anyone who dared treat him like a human being. —Brorby

e saw in the dance an intense dialogue, a dialogue he realized he had been craving for so much of his life. He wanted passion, but more than that, he wanted deep connection. He wanted to be understood. —Wali

ur civilization’s demise is old news. In our imaginations, we’re already far past all this. We’ve seen the collapse. We rehearsed it during the pandemic. Now we’re preparing our offspring for what comes after the end. —Zilberbourg

omeone would die, nobody would talk about it, and everyone moved on. Like eating a halfway decent but forgettable meal by yourself. Here one second, gone like a turd flushed down the toilet the next. —Kisarauskas

’d thought this might be a big deal, answer some more questions about what life could have been. Death always seemed like it should be a big deal, like being close to it might change you. But, here, not so much. —Castle

he slips into the water like the mermaid she used to dream that she was as a little girl. It only takes a handful of laps for her fin to emerge, and for all three suns to appear in the sky above her. —Tayyar

n the case of the falling man of this story, falling is a sickness. He began falling in 1996. He died last Halloween, still waiting for a new liver. From the same friend of a friend, I learned the falling man was buried in a family plot at the same cemetery as Raymond Chandler, Mt. Hope, where, according to its website, some of San Diego’s most notable citizens have been interred. —Price

here was a precursor. It wasn’t another girl. It was a card game with an Armenian-American heavy metal band. —Tower

’d read that twenty-second hugs boost your immune system and outlook, so they’d become our thing. But twenty seconds feels like twenty hours when you’re calculating your short-term and long-term futures, two distinctly different yet interrelated prospects. —Farmer

ne morning, Samuel Gregory woke up from easy dreaming to find himself transformed into something magnificent. He was like a, like a — a God beetle. Yeah, that’s it. The perfection of divinity writ small. —Bridges