On the fifth day, Dahlia follows Mina around the amusement park. The stalking hadn’t been a planned affair, but somehow seemed inevitable. There was that way Mina kept her hair tied up in elastic, fingers red and constantly in the company of each other, that manner of looking shaken-up and in need of a shaking-down. [...]
Even from several hundred meters away, her feet are clearly visible. Pink socks, it seems, carnation pink like a decomposing hog’s tongue. She’s in what appears to be a large woman’s blouse, gauzy fabric that billows out behind her as she pads along the sand. The shirt her sails, the long neck her mast, and [...]
During our morning snack break, the girls and boys of the eleventh and twelfth grades gather in the cafeteria. It’s not the one we eat lunch in, but a classier area meant for teachers, outfitted with a bar and coffee machine. For half an hour, after third period, the tiled linoleum, the tables and chairs, the glass [...]
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I spent yesterday afternoon eating udon in my mother’s office. Afterwards my brother and I lie on the floor, surrounded by mannequins and furniture catalogs. Though my mother works in the design department, she is not involved in design; she does the innovative business shebang. Still, whatever an innovative business room looks like, it can’t be [...]
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I’m terrified to no longer be sharing air with José Saramago, like somehow it’s not as pure anymore. “Blindness” is one the greatest things that’s ever happened to me. When I finished it I spent a few days fantasizing about sending Saramago a letter, which I never did. It would probably have been a useless endeavor anyway, [...]
The supermarket is selling paperback romance novels now. As my mother goes about choosing an appropriate watermelon, I flip through one at random: slinky virginal heroines and honeymoons spent feeding lovers choice meats. At four euros, or nearly five dollars, “Passion” would cost me a third of what “Blindness” by José Saramago did. Maybe I [...]
At three thirty, two hours before I am due home, my desk partner begins investigating a strange smell emanating from his backpack. We are in Math class, and I am finding it difficult to pay attention to functions when he’s got the bag on the table, and his entire upper body stuck in it. After [...]
On Wednesday the babies of Petrichor disappeared from three thousand four hundred seventy-two collective wombs. Fifty-four gynecologists told three thousand four hundred seventy-two women that, within forty-eight hours of each other, their fetuses had vanished completely and absolutely selfishly, without even a bloody stain to mark the divorce of organisms. The fetuses had ranged in age [...]