27: Under Water

In the park, Elliott says he’ll never love you. A fountain throws water like confetti. The ground cracks open and you’re in a strange city, penniless but surrounded by money, a thirsty sailor at sea. Gilded women swirl through the streets. Glass buildings sharpen blades of sunlight. You find a job serving the rich, wear used clothes, befriend a poet and an irate socialist. Then a good man falls for you. Making love is easy. But talking to him is like talking through water. You can’t make promises. Once the ground has opened, walking on it is no less than a miracle.

26: Unresolved Magic

Two people meet. Greg and Lucy. Graham and Owen. On the subway platform or at a mutual friend's going away party. The conditions are right: partly chemical, partly circumstantial. So they end up together. Note the shift from acting to accident. End up. Fall in love. Like they're victims of the last bit of unresolved magic on Earth. A secular religion. The cult of romantic love. You say it's the only way. You're a carnival barker. I won't step right up and throw down all my money on some wild chance. I know my odds. What’s my rotten luck against your ambivalence?

25: Meet You

You meet you outside a diner. You dislike how you’re dressed, in faded jeans and button-down shirt, like you’re proving something. Your friend insisted you meet. It’s eerie, she said. But you don’t see the resemblance. “What now?” you ask. “Shall we have coffee?” you reply. Shall? Why are you putting on airs? Over coffee it comes out you’re both programmers, both play racquetball, both strum the guitar when you’re alone. Each time you reveal something, you respond with astonishment. You want to reach over and slap yourself. You are more than the sum of these details, the fidgety frog before you.

24: For the Lovers

When the cat bats at the dripping faucet, it is like a string plucked, her expectation answered by a note of silence. She waits. He does nothing. He cannot bear her silent music, her cat, anymore than he can bear her absence. He thinks, “I fear all the moments I’ll say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” She thinks, “I fear all the moments you won’t.” I am the narrator. I say what I can about puzzle pieces, tessellations, negative space. Can’t you see how it creates, encapsulates, is what it is not? The cat knocks his glasses from the table. They never hear me.

23: Love Letter

For once, just you and me. The rest of our rabble was God knows where. Crammed into the subway, we held the same pole. Your face was so close I counted the hairs on your jaw. You’d say I was crazy. How many nights did we drink until you’d talked your way through the maze of your love for another woman? But I’ll tell you (not that I’d ever tell you), sometimes it isn’t a choir holding one glorious note. Sometimes it’s forgetting you’re on the train until you hear the rattle and squeal again, that noise which was there all along.

22: The Conceptual Artist

Today the conceptual artist will do my job. All day I alphabetize files in an enormous room. The conceptual artist wants to appear authentic. He wears a sport coat. He stands beside me, filing. He’s accurate, but I’m faster. Finally I look at him. “You’re making fun of me,” I say. He doesn’t answer. “Stop it!” Still no answer. “I’m yelling at you,” I remind him. But the conceptual artist keeps filing as if on a high wire and one false step would send him plummeting. “Then I’m a conceptual artist,” I say and return to filing, relieved to have outwitted him.

21: Sarah

She woke to find father and son missing. Artifacts remained—razor, sneakers—remnants of a family she didn’t deserve. Twelve years before, that stranger on the porch. Because of the heat, she’d invited him in. Daring how he’d whispered in her ear. “Impossible,” Abe had said of her pregnancy. “A miracle,” she’d said.
This morning, Isaac’s folding knife gone, too. She wandered into the woods, wringing her hands, and broke into a run when she saw Isaac on the ground, Abraham’s arm raised. Wasting no breath on screaming, she ran fast enough to sprout wings, and seized his wrist with angelic force.