Outside the window I could hear men calling out to one another, stumbling up the street. Night, so! Safe home! Someone started singing. Then the baby stirred and the living room door clicked shut again. This time my husband heard it too. He got up, switched on the lights, checked that the apartment was locked (it was), and then turned off the lights and came back to bed. Soon he was fast asleep.
I was riding the F train home the other day reading Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. The local went express at Jay Street in Brooklyn, and I exchanged an exasperated smile with a woman on the platform. “Is that good?” she asked, pointing to the book. “I’ve been meaning to read it.” I called Whitehead’s disturbing way of mixing history and invention in his novel about slavery, “steampunk abolitionist” and she liked that. Manners obliging, I asked what she was reading. “Something with Ove in the title.” It was funny in surprising ways, but she couldn’t remember the name. We agreed nothing induces amnesia like being asked what you’re reading. The name and author came to her on the local. A Man Called Ove by Frederik Bachman. I promised to look it up. I got off at the next stop feeling rich for our impromptu book club, and grateful for a moment of literary communion that’s all but disappeared.
By AMY WELDON
Hoisting our backpacks, my students and I start up a narrow staircase that points us left and right. In November 1820, John Keats and his friend Joseph Severn climbed these stairs to two small rooms above the Spanish Steps, ready to stay until the end, which they knew wouldn’t be far away. Nevertheless, they rented a piano. Getting that piano back downstairs must have been a nightmare. Not to mention the armloads of drapes and rugs, and the sheets and the pillows, and the mattress, stained with sad rings of blood. But it was the law: all movable furnishings of a consumptive’s sickroom, even the wallpaper, must be burned. And then, on a late February day in 1821, would have come the carrying-down of Keats’ small body itself: a twenty-five-year-old man, five feet tall and wasted to the weight of an adolescent, the luminous eyes closed for good.
Tonight the boys swaying in the northbound train car
wear old-logo Bulls hats and France IV
stitched into their puffy jackets—
By SUNNA JUHN, ISABEL MEYERS, JULIA PIKE
For the transition to the new year, our staff picks mix old and new this month. These works of fiction explore themes of distance, change, ambition, and failure—and they all belong on your wish list.
Underground, you expected a loamy smell. Instead you inhale a dry, metallic breeze. The English-speaking Polish guide tells your tour group that the mine’s temperature holds at 57ºF despite the 80º May day above in Krakow. You zip up your jacket before you descend the stairs cut out of salt.
The last eel of the Rio Grande grows up lonely, brown and serpentine, a river with gills and a pulse swimming inside itself, spooning the river’s oxbows eager for siblings. What the eel doesn’t know could fill a book: that hydroelectric dams keep its kind from traveling upstream to spawn; that eels live elsewhere churning by the hundreds in slicktight knots; the taste of its own firm flesh smothered in soy sauce. The last eel stays ignorant, growing fat on cigarette butts and dreams of parents, growing heavy and slow feeding on the heavy metal hodgepodge downstream of the power plants, a bully coiled up in dark water only coming out to scare smaller fish into submission. And then one day it happens: the flossy flick of a line, the hook and tug before the drag. The eel fights, but its broad, tubed muscles are lazy from afternoon sleeps. It hasn’t run swiftly through a spring flood in years. Hands pull it easily from the water, helped along by the river saying ‘take it, I don’t want this anymore.’
This post is for testing various stuff.
The night my colleagues and I sat around the bistro table and stockpiled our grief—I couldn’t get out of bed, said one; I cried to strangers, replied another—the night we compared the protests we’d attended and petitions we’d signed and officials we’d called; the night we declared we were going broke from our impulsive, panicked donations; the night we marveled at how many specials our waiter had memorized—scores of sauces and sides; the night we failed to retain a single one; the night I showed pictures of my son scrawling “Love Wins” on pink paper; the night we traded stats like playing cards—how many women, how many stayed home—even though stats were the thing that sparked our grief in the first place; the night we realized, with fright, that we didn’t know what or whom to trust: this, my friend, is the night you learned I’d betrayed you.
By KELLI ALLEN
Some road trips are propelled by an arrow of indifference. We look for the keys on their ring, nestled often in a bag of felid mice. If my open sweater signifies carry, tail and tuft and brass also mean rest.
When we drove past the circus hand’s kitchen, open in way of Southern Indiana late summers, we smelled peaches burning on the rough iron stove. I remembered when you told me that every day is a sliding between an expectation and an opening. It was easy to hand-over every coin in my purse and burn both our tongues with pit fruits and cheap bourbon.
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Celebrating 15 Years