He closed the fridge door, made his last breakfast - scrambled eggs - and showered, dressed, combed his hair, left for the theater an hour early so he'd have time to linger with the newspaper over his...
Garrett had had a wife and four-year-old twins in Halifax, but the last call he’d ever made was to his boss. The last words he’d spoken into a telephone were a bouquet of corporate clichés, seared hor...
Do you remember when you were young and gorgeous? Clark wanted to ask. Do you remember when everything seemed limitless?
Cold rain, the sidewalk shining, the shhh of car tires on the wet street. Thinking about the terrible gulf of years between eighteen and fifty.
Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human e...
But why me? We haven’t spoken since the last divorce hearing. You know where I’m from, he said, and she understood what he meant by this. Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferr...
But these thoughts broke apart in his head and were replaced by strange fragments: This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air. Finally whispering the same two wo...
But the trouble, is she doesn’t really care. There was a time when this conversation would have reduced her to tears, but now she swivels in her chair to look out at the lake and thinks about moving t...
Because we are always looking for the former world, before all the traces of the former world are gone.
Because survival is insufficient,
And here, all momentum left him. He could go no farther. The theater tickets had been intended as a romantic gesture, a let's-do-something-romantic-because-all-we-do-is-fight, and she'd abandoned him...
All those people, Clark said to Imaginary Robert, but Imaginary Robert didn’t reply.
They shared a suspicion that the world might prove, in the end, to have been either a mirage or a particularly elaborate hoax.
The more you remember, the more you’ve lost.
So maybe a fairer way of putting this would be to say that adulthood’s full of ghosts. I’m sorry, I’m not sure I quite— I’m talking about these people who’ve ended up in one life instead of another an...
Paper fell out of the book. It was a page torn from
Had an idea—too sentimental to speak aloud and he knew none of his divorced friends would ever own up to it—that something must linger, a half-life of marriage, some sense memory of love even if obvio...
Did you just say you’re famous for your discretion?
But mostly his work just made him dislike houses. These enormous anchors that people tied to their lives.
You’ve actually just reminded me. I brought you something. She had finally assembled the first two issues of the Dr. Eleven comics, and had had a few copies printed at her own expense. She extracted t...