AB Intra

The studio was his music-cave; it held his world. His piano faced the window at an angle; behind it stood a carved-oak desk with a soundless red-telephone that blinked when a call came through. While I was there, only once did he answer the orange-flickering-light. — Aller

Joy's impenetrable gaze, hidden behind omnipresent prescription sunglasses. Joy’s two sable-black German Shepherds protecting her interests like Anubis, the guardian of the scales in the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The more I read about Joy Williams, the more nervous I got. — Tower

aurette has a cloth coat with mink collar and cuffs; Linda’s is all sable, with her monogram on the silk lining. But then Linda ran off with that ferkakte goy, a jazz pianist named Howard Royal, a man whose mother traces her lineage back to a ship and not the kind you rode in steerage. — Landis

She reminded me of the relatives who were often in our living room during our first years in America: assorted grandmothers and aunts and cousins, all of them old enough to have seen Mohammad Mossadegh speak in person, and to have remembered news of the Apadana hoard of coins which had been discovered beneath the ruins of an ancient palace in Persepolis. — Tayyar

t was just beginning to rain, and as I watched, the first drops fell upon my mother’s book, leaving Rorschach-like blotches in the soot, but before I could imagine phalluses and butterflies, the rain picked up, washing the pages clean, and then instead of Monet and Cezanne and Renoir, I was looking at an old family album with photos of my parents as newlyweds, myself as a boy, people I didn’t know sitting and waving on a beach. — Moskowitz

envision a kind of Spa Failure. You don’t go there to improve yourself, like Baden Baden or Canyon Ranch, you go to bathe in your own limitations. It might be pleasant. The towels would be nice. No point in complaining about the food. The company, like in Hell, would be interesting. — Daniels

ife is real and life is earnest,” he would tell me, but then the qualifier: “Until our ship comes in.” The Depression and many lean years had convinced him of that, and he wanted me to prove a serious contender in my own right. I’ve evidence that we got down to it early on. — Yates

ver the prior seventy-two hours, precious little in our town has transpired. We considered going to press with coverage of the Traegers’ child trying cantaloupe. The photo of her first bite is hilarious. Spoiler alert: little Lena was no fan! — Pitt

he had a hard enough time teaching community college. What had she really figured out in the handful of years since she was that age? What could she pass on to them? It was like trying to fix someone’s car while yours sat in the backyard, grass in the wheel wells and bees in the engine. — Schwarz

raw a line between There and Here, and watch the deserts and plains recede, disappear, the evaporation of culture into a blue sky warped by carbon emissions. The tawny, barren geologies of time and space compress, and along the interstate trees rise, streams and lakes, fecundity. — Kinney-Lang

nd then there were answers to the questions scientists didn’t investigate, like how many blades of grass there were on earth, how many seconds each person with a beating heart had left to live, an exact count of how many people a person would love and how many would love them, or on what date the world would end. — Love

on’t listen to what the doctor says. Your family will take notes, focus on their faces: worried and teary-eyed and sleepless. You’re twenty-six, forget all logic, it was never going to help anyway. — sosa

ur chances of being dinged by a titanium nut or bolt are much better than winning Power Ball Super Lotto or the Irish Sweepstakes. So really, what’s the feasibility you’ll end up wearing a starry crown and circling a nebula far, far away? — Buckley

ince Redda’s mother worked and Redda had never known her father, she’d spent a fair amount of her childhood at her grandmother’s house, and she’d been traversing the woods on her own since she was a little girl. Though occasionally she did run across “characters,” as her grandmother called them, nothing had ever happened to give great cause for alarm. — Smith-Seetachitt

hat she meant was, before the March Revolution, immigrants had been saturating the U.S. They had fled from countries the U.S. had backed civil wars in, such as El Salvador, Chile, and Guatemala. More Latinx restaurants and businesses had sprouted. The Right tried to frame this as Erasing American Identity. — Genovesi

ut if her eyes were closed, long lashes or not, how was it that she could see quite clearly what she passed in the night? Which was also to say, why could she, in fact, see everything as she floated so smoothly, carried steadily onward by the water’s flowing current? — LASalle