On the way back from Tarragona, my mother informs the rest of the car that she wants to buy tomatoes. Her body is built into, but not limited to, the space of the driver’s seat. In quantum physics, observing an object changes it, due to the instruments used in observation. How can we know anything, [...]
I called the psychiatrist half an hour ago. Outside on the balcony, so she wouldn’t hear me, holding the phone in one hand and the slip with his number on the other. He had a voice like a classmate of mine, regular, almost boyish, especially careful. I told him about her. He seemed nice, and, [...]
I don’t know when it suddenly became passé to mention the September 11 attacks. I’m given this look that’s almost disdainful, like I’m breaking some goddamn rule by talking about it. Is there a time limit to grief? I wonder if it’s because no one I know died there. I don’t have a right to [...]
After the wedding I go outside in socks and sweater. The marquee is being slowly disassembled by a handful of caterers from Super Event – grim-faced workers in red shirts who afterwards sit on the cold grass and smoke cigarettes. I think about how my father had discovered this very habit in my cousin last [...]
Conscience Round has found its name from the phenomenon of the blank cartridge in firing squads. It doesn’t sound very happy, does it? Not at first glance. I like it though. Comments are once again enabled after a three month long break, so comment wherever and whenever you want (that means you, Hershey). The tagline [...]
At the beach my mother decides to try a little new-age parenting. Dressed in bathing suits and old flip-flops, we grab chalk uncovered in a dresser and start drawing on the exterior walls of the house. They are white and smooth - more than adequate for our enthusiastic doodling. It is our grandfather who built this house and [...]
The thing is, Herostratus knows the system. He wakes up in a mush of hungover wobbleupdown vomit, slicks back hair clothes propriety and sneaks into a city whose intensity he neither mimics nor understands. This is Ephesus, where he is nothing but part of the crackle and bark of this condensed human mass. Ephesus, a [...]
I kind of wanted an epiphany for my fifteenth birthday, but no such luck.
When the dentist suddenly picked up that three-pronged, sharpish, scythe look-alike, I’ll admit to have been just a bit scared. But other than that? Getting braces wasn’t that difficult. The dentist was the kind of woman I’d love to have as a grandmother and, despite her rather spasm-inducing choice of profession and her Hannibal-worthy weapons [...]
I was prepared to write something cute – whimsical even – to end the year. As unmistakably peppy as those vibrant, deafening rallies we used to have at my old school (even though I found the sheer mass of cheerleaders in the room to be almost suffocating). Staring at the empty screen, it took me [...]