Sublime

Briefly Carleton considered the other man, of whom he’d made such a study he might have been appointed professor of Thomas Studies at the University of Essex. He knew, for example, that Thomas was a confirmed bachelor, as they say, never seen in the company of a beautiful young person or a stately older one; that he had about him the melancholy rel

Mrs. Sloper, who on this first day gave me the exact same look of incurious distaste I would receive from her for the next thirteen months, and wore (this I sure remember) a lavenderish pantsuit against which the abundant rouge and kohl were even more ghastly. She was maybe fifty, and very thin and tendony, and had the same asymmetrical beehive coi

flinch. I believe my father saw this in me and did what he could to drown out whatever primordial voice had told me to fold up my personhood into something small and negligible.

That repairman passed his father’s dream down to his son, Walter.

The story in our family was that Mum was often difficult. I had evidence, memories; psychotherapists had agreed with these memories. But after sitting in that room, not wanting anyone to be different, I didn’t want anything about my life to have been different either. My sister and I started to tell each other Mum’s Famous Outrages—the “Can you bel

I wish I could feed the fish, he thought. He is my brother. But I must kill him and keep strong to do it.

one was a bookie, one was a burglar, one was a bomber, and one was a mistake. Barney Northrup had rented one of the apartments to the wrong person.

UNEVENTFUL AFTERNOON. APPEARS THREAT DEFERRED OR NEW TARGET ACQUIRED. KUDOS. I think of the dusty room and the wheezing baby, with her nostrils flared wide. I think of her dad, making choices to protect her—from pollution and air strikes and drones. I think about how everybody believes that they are the good guy. And how the trick of the thing is s