Three Stories
Crack Chicken There’s a paper plate on the counter and a plastic fork and it hurts my heart to see them just sitting there so i make an egg. I pour a little bit of sunflower oil into my small red frying pan and stick it on the hot plate. I put some pepper on […]
Burn and Dodge
There was a golf cart stolen—one of us stole, the rest caught a ride—and on it we rattled through darkness, giddy with wind on our faces, the ditches off the road to either side shades darker than what was in front of us, pitch-black. The tops of the trees ranged overhead. Everywhere my vision fell […]
I’ll Let You Go
She’d woken with a premonition in the middle of the night. This was about a man she’d once loved. Sometimes a premonition arrives after the event it describes. (In that case, would we call it knowledge?) This man drew a circle around some things and not others. (This is common. Who doesn’t have their own […]
Nothing Personal
There was him and Anxin and me and Anxin was very young. This wasn’t a love triangle because I knew the dangers of wanting to make someone else’s dreams come true. I’d done that once before. We carried equipment—cables and things zippered in nylon. We did heavy lifting and then I sat in that pile, he called it, of water. […]
Excerpt from Exit to Americana
Yes, Mr. Caruso. The fantasy begins the same way. Mr. Caruso doesn’t mean to interrupt, but he has been so concerned about my happiness, he had to pay a visit. Do I feel I made the right choice, choosing the one bedroom with the terrace above the Apple Store, instead of the two bedroom with […]
It Might’ve Happened Earlier
Pure skyline and all the horizons I’ll never forget—and I’m thinking about how washing windows would be a pretty hard job, maybe one of the hardest. Not because of the heights but because the only way to know you’ve done a perfect job is when you can see yourself at least more clearly than when […]
Always To Do
There is a landscape I return to once I’ve been let down by every last body. Not a horizon, but a fully fleshed out three dimensions— with the topography of a furrowed brow— my gaze is the unadulterated sun ready to burn skin. My papers— technology— sobriety— and intoxication. After the second heartbreak I called […]
Blue Ocean, Green Bottle, Red Curtain, Black Flag
There it was on the globe, a dashed line of darker blue on the lighter blue Atlantic. Words in faint italic script: Tropic of Cancer. The adults told her to stop asking what it was, as if the dull reply they gave would satisfy: “A latitude, in this case twenty-three degrees.” She pictured daisy chains […]
Paranoia, my happiness: Caren Beilin in conversation with Hilary Plum
The first half of this interview took place in the summer. The World Cup was over and I felt like I could think. Caren and I corresponded through August heat and Gmail. In the shortening days since I’ve wanted badly to continue the conversation, to turn it toward Caren’s new book Spain, just out this […]
Victory
for Tory Dent • Something spreading underground won’t speak to us under skin won’t declare itself not all life-forms want dialogue with the machine-gods in their drama hogging down the deep bush clear-cutting refugees from ancient or transient villages into our opportunistic fervor to search […]
