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For all its fantastical filigree, horror is just reality pushed to its intrusive limit. In a mystery, the event is discrete; horror is continuous; its half life is long, even asymptotic. It felt, during the trial, like mothers all around the country were trying to convince themselves that this was a mystery.
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No one ever told me not to talk about the company, which didn’t mean that there wasn’t an unspoken rule against it. I was a voracious consumer of any and all things business of media, and it wasn’t hard to notice that no one from Conde was going on People versus Algorithms to talk their…
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There is something in me that resists the heaping of pleasures when the heaping requires additional foresight or logistical effort. I would never think to pack a nice hamper for the beach, let alone a tent or an entire small, rolling house. I have always been this way, and my friend Ann has always been…
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I am a self-absorbed and fairly selfish person, with persistent and unwarranted faith in elastic time, and these traits leave scant accommodation for anyone else’s activities. I want my children to be happy, and to find things they like or even love doing, and have the freedom to do them – and, as with parenting…
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Here was a night, mid-May, that dropped into the thirties. The pregnant wren had endured a week of blustery rain; the mudroom, in these conditions, gets no light at all. I was sorry for her, and then, once her chicks were born, anxious. A newborn carolina wren is a goofy, fragile thing – goofy and…
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The highway leading out of Mexico City to the pyramids at Teotihuacan is eight lanes, four to a side, that wrap around the subway and then the railroad and are braced by inner and then outer city buses. The peseros run on diesel, still, and are both charming – boxy and enameled in cream and…
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Great Expectations reads like a memoir; it has the memoirist’s capricious elisions and divulgences; because it is written from a distance, elements that might, in a novel, serve as key plot points (eg: becoming a father at nineteen) are bulleted; we get a different coming of age: the dawn of a critic, ambivalently participating in…
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I come home from New York ravenous. Nine forty five at night, that backlit dark of mid autumn, with it tremulous hunter’s moon. I hear soft music and O’s high, piping voice – she is in her bed, curled against my mother, looking at photographs of herself. Only when she is very tired will she…
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A thin strip of sand-edged road, fast eroding, separates the Vineyard Sound from a large salt pond the Wapanoaug named Sengekontacket, place where the brook flows. Here, the cormorants scritch scritch from the opposite bank, and a flock of blue-white gulls rear up in a wild, undulating fracas, but the water is still and temperate,…
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The sky and sea were the same color, lapis shot through with malamute steel, an open mouth with a hangnail moon under which I mostly drifted, though occasionally I stood to get the full, battering force of the incoming tide. Yards away, my friend was chanting up at the sky, “flourish,”relish,” some pleasant, sybillant incantation…
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