102 STORIES IN 102 WORDS

35: Double

2009-05-19T20:22:00.001-04:00

I saw her once in National Geographic, a child growing up amidst the civil war of Eastern Europe, her straggly brown hair and round eyes the mirror of my own. I didn’t show anyone, knowing how my brother sneered at my seriousness, knowing this girl was one of the sacred sufferers for whom my mother prayed. Any comparison to me invited scorn. Instead I stared until the afternoon light faded. I was not transformed, didn’t suddenly recognize myself as one of a human tribe, but, instead, understood our separation, my unrecorded unreality, the sheer randomness of my birth. I could be anyone.

34: How To Be With Someone

2009-05-19T20:20:00.002-04:00

Let go of superstition. Don’t look for signs in fortune cookies or count steps to his apartment. Become a literalist. Stay says only be here now. Remember the meaning of any phrase expires the moment after he utters it. Leave no evidence—not hair in the tub nor perfume in the sheets—so that you can disappear as easily as he would. When you walk, swing your arms like it doesn’t matter if he takes your hand. Live as he does, as though no bird were trapped in your rib cage, as though you didn’t cough and lose feathers to the air.

33: Carlos Rio Doesn't Live Here Anymore

2009-04-03T08:57:00.002-04:00

Joe and Melanie move into the apartment, but the mail for Carlos Rio never stops. How strange to meet a man through his bills and catalogues, she thinks. “Who moves and doesn’t change his address?” Joe says. At first they leave the mail on the ledge. After weeks, Joe tapes a note to the mailbox. Melanie hopes it doesn’t work. She can’t help but read the postcard with the photo of a San Juan statue. Carlos, Lo Siento. Donde estas? Melanie buys a Spanish dictionary. River, she thinks, tracing a line across the mirror steamed with Joe’s shower. She will find him.

32: The Accident

2009-03-03T23:43:00.001-05:00

Bonnie escapes outside to smoke, to forget he’s leaving her, bit by bit. She hears a thump, a man’s startled grunt, and turns to see a car angled, a man lying in the street, struggling, an insect on its back. The woman driver is screaming. People on the sidewalk shout, “don’t get up!” as if eager for injury. But he picks up his bike and limps away. The woman yells, “Don’t go!” Bonnie remembers when they met it felt like a collision, sudden and dangerous. The crowd on the sidewalk scatters, disappointed, expecting tragedy but left with the rest of the day.

31: Baby Thief

2009-01-18T21:16:00.003-05:00

No balloons outside houses or newspaper announcements. Parents dress infants like dogs to fool the casual glance. MISSING posters line subway stations. The law allows a woman just one pregnancy. They told me I’m too sick. After my operation, I answered a private investigator's ad promising to find your child. “Your child?” he said from behind his cluttered desk. “All babies look alike.” “How much?” I asked. “For you?” He looked me up and down. The baby arrived at night. I told my neighbors my sister was killed. “So sad,” they said. I clung to the infant. “Tragedy can bring good fortune.”

30: How to Be Alone

2009-01-18T21:15:00.001-05:00

First, tell him it’s over. Tell your friends you’re satisfied. Take yourself to movies. Read books in bed. When eating, hide the sound of your chewing with talk radio. For momentum, ride the subway. Spend time with a man who doesn’t look at you that way. When the thought of him threatens to turn you into a shiny penny, resist. Live as the addicts do, one day at a time. Give yourself something to anticipate: take up smoking. Commit. Alone is not lonely. Alone is you asleep. Lonely is you at the hands of a mugger, the victim of someone else’s need.

29: The Moon, the Moon

2008-12-08T19:16:00.000-05:00

Again, I’m fretting, plucking at my gloves while we walk, wind flung like needles against my skin. On one side, the dark curtain of the park, on the other, stoic townhouses where we’ll never live. “Lovely,” you say. What you admire, I scorn. An old man totters past. “Look at the moon,” he says, eager, gesturing with his cane. A nub of light, not full, not a delicate sliver. “It’s something,” you agree, always so good-natured with strangers. I take your arm without knowing why. The way I can’t say what’s wrong. The way I can’t say why this moon is beautiful.

28: On the Train

2008-12-07T23:46:00.001-05:00

Her children admire the tasseled curtains, pretend scenes smeared in the window are a moving picture. Jack is ten, the little man. Marie, just six, hugs her grown-up purse. In Albany, a man in a brown felt hat boards. She barely recognizes her husband, clean-shaven and alert. Mercifully, he sits rows away, hat over eyes, napping. Marie doesn’t know him. But Jack keeps wriggling around until she hisses, “Stop!” Jack’s eyes turn wet. “It’s impolite to stare at strangers,” she says, gently. Without his drink, the man’s as harmless as a stranger. Still she shudders every time he shifts in his sleep.

27: Under Water

2008-10-25T17:47:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-27T17:31:00.001-04:00

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

2008-09-25T12:54:00.000-04:00

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

2008-08-24T22:28:00.001-04:00

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

2008-08-07T23:12:00.000-04:00

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

2008-04-30T11:45:00.001-04:00

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

2008-02-15T23:32:00.000-05:00

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.

20: Postcard Home

2008-02-14T17:18:00.000-05:00

Just landed last night. Today, started exploring. So many people! Stared up at the Empire State Building. Photographed the light in Grand Central. Ate a chilidog in Central Park. Poked around a bookshop near Washington Square. Found this photo book of real murder scenes from a century ago. A woman gapes, slumped in her deflated skirts. A man, limbs crooked, is wedged into an alley. Looked at every picture, cringing. One hundred years should erase any nausea, the costumes and wallpaper like a diorama. So many people, so what about these few? Except then I remembered it always ends this way. Always.

19: Here's Me

2008-02-13T10:39:00.000-05:00

My sister invented the game. At six, she was the source of all such wisdom. Stand on your twin bed, pillow puckered under your feet. Announce, “Here’s me.” Fall face-first onto your bed, giggling. It was fun because our mother, on the phone, snapped her fingers for quiet. She hated the game, maybe for the same reason, as a graduate student, it troubles me. Children invented ring-around-the-rosy during the bubonic plague. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. From the seminar table, my sister’s game looks like a manifestation of life’s tragedy: here and then gone. How we explained my father’s sudden absence.

18: Hey, Stranger

2008-01-31T12:16:00.000-05:00

Margot drifts off. Guy drapes her in his sweater. The eleven o’clock news replays at two. Homeless man killed by subway, according to a sobbing witness. At first, Guy doesn’t remember her. Longer hair, same glasses. He took her out, although she was gawky, strange. When he bailed early, she looked crushed. He was embarrassed for her. Now, cheeks wet, she says, “So terrible.” No other witness cries. Margot stirs and the sweater slips, revealing the still horizon of her neck illuminated by jumping light. As Guy touches her skin he wonders how that girl can dissolve at the loss of a stranger.

17: Possibility

2008-01-31T11:18:00.000-05:00

Elliot says he will never love you. His certainty is a wall, so he doesn’t see you making eyes at possibility. Afterward, you date for quantity rather than quality. With each one, you make a prediction—Glen will complain about buying me dinner. Peter will say I’m a bleeding heart. Dennis will prefer larger breasts—daring possibility to deliver. Until one day, you fall in love with possibility, the way it enfolds the future like a dimpled orange rind. You roll it between your hands, but won’t sink your nail into the skin, weary of the moment you taste what is there.

16: Vanity

2008-01-12T23:01:00.001-05:00

In third grade, Jay Malone ran up to Bonnie, chanting, you have no alibi. Later, she missed her bus, staring at her reflection in the trophy case. Freshman mixer, some spiky-haired kid tapped her on the shoulder, then said, “Nevermind,” when she turned around. During slow songs, she studied her face floating over the row of bathroom sinks. At the cafe, Brandon Schuster hauled dish tubs for other girls, but never Bonnie. She watched herself move in the metal workings of the coffee machines. Whatever. It was like the tip jar, stuffed with dollar bills she’d have to split with everyone else.

15: Run

2007-12-29T02:01:00.000-05:00

Elliott says he never loved you.
“All that for sex?” you ask.
How strange to demand your body stop loving.
At a concert, lost in the rhythm of limbs, you meet Dan. You shout that you’re moving out of state, and end up in bed, snarled in his tattoed arms.
Next morning, you’re a tangle of wires, so you go running. Feet thump the pavement like drum beats. Muscles rope under skin. A heart flaps in its ribcage. You’d forgotten the body. Even as Dan pushed inside, you believed. But as your breath turns to sand, you become a body, nothing more.

14: Tuesday

2007-12-29T02:00:00.000-05:00

The sky is ceramic blue, and just as fragile. Jets scrape overhead. If you go outside, a coworker says, you can see smoke.
They let us leave work early. Michael and I ride the train. A kid in a baseball cap signals to a young man wearing headphones.
“What’s that?” Baseball cap asks of the jangle we all hear.
“Turkish music.”
“Something wrong with American music?”
I flinch.
“No,” the young man says, then hands the headphones over his seat.
The kid in the cap accepts and listens, nodding with the rhythm.
Michael doesn’t remember, but this happened. I swear it did.

13: The God Who Swallowed Poison to Save the World

2007-12-20T14:14:00.000-05:00

Sundeep returned from India, made love to Kate, then showered. In his bag, she discovered a four-armed god, beautiful as a museum statue. But why carry it, like her grandmother carried holy cards? When Sundeep climbed back into bed, she curled against him. “Tell me about the gods."
He snorted. “One god’s throat turned blue. He swallowed poison to save the world.”
“Jesus,” Kate said. “Gods always die to save us.”
He didn’t answer.
“Do you think it’s true?”
“True?”
“Real like this,” she said, touching his warm skin.
“For me,” he said, “This is another world.”
And she didn’t ask again.

12: Dream

2007-12-05T21:25:00.001-05:00

Perhaps I wade through the grass, or else I’m only watching it on film. A man joins me. When we climb into a car, I find a second man waiting. The first man stabs the second man, who yells so long and loud it must be real. I grieve, but do nothing. Maybe it is just a movie. The men are strangers, but the dream is about you telling me I could choose to be fine. As if I could reach into my sleep and take out that dream like taking a toad from a jar. Like you vanished in the dark.

11: Time Travel

2007-11-29T12:34:00.000-05:00

Elliot says he will never love you.
“Then I’ll build a time machine,” you reply.
He looks confused.
“I’ll go back to the day we met, and demand, at gunpoint, that you leave me alone.”
“I’ll call the police,” Elliot says.
“Then I’ll travel to the future and fix the trial.”
He frowns. “Time travel is impossible.”
“Then how can you know the future?”
“I don’t. But what if I’m right?”
“Then I’ll build a time machine,” you say.
“Impossible,” he says again.
“Like loving me.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Elliot says.
You smile. “Then build me a time machine.”