This was during the final month of the era when it was possible to press a series of buttons on a telephone and speak with someone on the far side of the earth.
They are always waiting, the people of the Undersea. They spend all their lives waiting for their lives to begin. Miranda
Theatre in Toronto. Earlier in the evening, three little girls had played a clapping game onstage as the audience entered, childhood versions of Lear’s daughters, and now they’d returned as hallucinat...
The house is silent now and she feels like a stranger here. This life was never ours, she whispers to the dog, who has been following her from room to room, and Luli wags her tail and stares at Mirand...
The boy turns to his parents and for an instant in the twilight he looks like his namesake, like Jeevan’s brother. He comes to them, the moment already passed, and Jeevan lifts him into his arms to ki...
She likes Hollywood best at night, in the quiet, when it's all dark leaves and shadows and night-blooming flowers, the edges softened, gently lit streets curving up into the hills.
SOMETIMES THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY thought that what they were doing was noble. There were moments around campfires when someone would say something invigorating about the importance of art, and everyon...
Or maybe just an amphetamine freak? Clark’s thoughts wandered to a particularly exciting week in Toronto, eighteen or nineteen years old, when he and Arthur had accepted some pills from a new friend a...
No more social media, no more scrolling through litanies of dreams and nervous hopes and photographs of lunches, cries for help and expressions of contentment and relationship-status updates with hear...
LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There
Is it possible that somewhere there are ships setting out? If there are again towns with streetlights, if there are symphonies and newspapers, then what else might this awakening world contain? Perhap...
Forever is the most dizzying word in the English language. The idea of staying in one place forever was like standing at the border of a foreign country, peering over the fence and trying to imagine w...
Eli left her there. In the kitchen he found the pomegranate he’d bought for her and quartered it quickly on a pale blue plate. He thought the contrast between the shades of the pomegranate and the blu...
Clark disliked the general state of unshavenness, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly because he was a believer in the broken-windows theory of urban-crime management, the way the appearance of de...
Also because the two young women working the kiosk seemed profoundly unconcerned by what was unfolding on CNN, either that or they were extremely stoic or they hadn’t noticed yet, so visiting them was...
All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text:
AT FIRST THE PEOPLE in the Severn City Airport counted time as though they were only temporarily stranded. This was difficult to explain to young people in the following decades, but in all fairness,...
A man was curled on his side near the elevators, shivering. She wanted to speak to him, but speaking would take too much strength, so she looked at him instead—I see you, I see you—and hoped this was...
The best advice her mother ever gave her: Walk in like you own the place.)
He 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 ob...