In a minute, we’re going back into that corridor. We’re the controls. Your words. Right? Yeah. If that’s the truth, if it’s our emotional state that’s somehow selecting these worlds, to what kind of a...
I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precario...
I think I finally understand why God went away and left the world to destroy itself.
I feel insanity stalking me again, threatening to curl me up fetal and shatter me into a million pieces. But I shit it down, returning to my new mantra. I am not allowed to think I’m crazy.
How can something so powerful in one world not bleed through into this one?
His father asked Ethan in a raspy voice, You spend time with your son? Much as I can, he’d answered, but his father had caught the lie in his eyes. It’ll be your loss, Ethan. Day’ll come, when he’s gr...
Glimpsed something catching sunlight straight above. Froze. Looked down.
Given for me to confirm I had removed the chip. The first at 1400 on Day 5312. The next at 1500 on Day 5313. If I failed to remove the chip by Day 5313, we would have no further interaction.
Fifteen years ago, before we met, Daniela was a comer to Chicago's art scene. She had a studio in Bucktown, showed her work in half-dozen galleries, and had just lined up her first solo exhibition in...
Everywhere Ethan looks, lights are coming on inside houses, the air becoming fragrant with the smell of suppers cooking. Through cracked windows, he hears clanging dishes, indistinct conversations, ov...
Even right now, it’s like I’m seeing you for the first time, and I have this nervous ache in my stomach. I think about you every second. I think about all the choices we’ve made that created this mome...
Ethan didn’t miss those things. Didn’t wish that his son was growing up in a world where people stared at screens all day. Where communication had devolved into the tapping of tiny letters and humanit...
Different in a thousand tiny ways that might mean nothing and might mean everything.
Children’s laughter—carefree, giddy, maniacal—filled the woods. A nightmare version of some game from his youth.
Children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes. We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts: The pleasure of eating real food, seeded...
Careful. Like shooting-heroin-into-your-femoral-artery careful. There’s a razor blade hidden in the bottom of your handbag under a piece of black electrical tape.
Bartender. And though the word hadn’t been shouted, something in its tone implied a command that ought not be ignored. Clearly the barkeep picked up on it, too, because he was standing in front of Arn...
Back home, he’d often wake in the middle of the night to feel her arm thrown over him, her body contoured to his. Even on the hardest nights. Nights he’d come home late. Nights they fought. Nights he’...
At this point, I’m not even sure what to be afraid of—this reality that might actually be true, or the possibility that everything is going to pieces inside my head.
Aside from each other, this box is the only constant we have.A very tiny boat in the middle of a very large ocean.It’s our shelter.Our prison.Our home.