Conjunctions

How we negotiate our way through life’s many rites of passage reflects, even defines, who we are as we hasten toward the inevitable. From childhood we share the right to evolve into adolescence, celebrating our birthdays with cake and a tally of lit candles. After youth, middle age is upon us like a fast-rising tide. Picking up speed as they expire, our days fly from senescence to the burial rites we are forced to attend but are unable to observe.

Call me a trendmonger, but I’ve sprung for a tree house. My bamboo pod hovers amid galba trees, nestled in jungle but open to the sea, the porch equipped with hemp hammocks. A flowering vine snakes along the railings, pimping its wistful perfume. With a single remote control, I may adjust the ceiling fans, fine-tune the lighting, or lift the plate-glass windows, which flip open like beetle wings.

After the sudden death of my employer, I was tasked with overseeing the transfer of his personal library. The books would travel from his studio in New York City to an arts foundation in Italy, where my employer had once enjoyed a long and productive stay, many years in the past. He was a playwright—a very famous one— and his personal library contained over five thousand books, including a number of rare volumes.

As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog. Fredo was also a peace offering of sorts. We’d been fighting a lot recently, sometimes just picking at each other. Sometimes throwing force four tornadoes.

11.13.24 The Family Night Watchman Translated from Chinese by Deanna Ren In the South, on the nights of a sweltering summer, we children like to sleep in the middle of the road. No cars pass by overnight; everyone plops their water-cooled bamboo beds outside, and the moment of excitement arrives. Ah, the corpse drivers! Ah, the Spider Demon King! Ah, the Milky Way! Ah, what we cannot struggle free of . . .

His body had been in the trunk some hours already when she began to feel him next to her in the cab as well. She couldn’t see him at first, could only sense he was there. But soon the hair on her right arm stood up and the air beside her began to shimmer. Before she began to see him fully, she whipped her gaze away. She looked straight ahead. She didn’t know how long she drove, staring at what she could see of the desert road in the headlights, desperately resisting a desire to glance over.

This house isn’t haunted, has never been, but that will change when, some years from now, I will sometimes feel a chill, and sometimes I will feel alone, and sometimes a voice will say, “Who are you and what have you done with Donna?” And I will try to respond, but I won’t know who Donna is, won’t even know a Donna. I fear I might someday learn.

Report: Wasting Syndrome (SSWS) in Pisaster Ochraceus Location: Dog Island Research Station, Puget Sound, 48.5607° N, 122.7623° W Author: Liis Reishus, PhD, Affiliated Researcher, Dept. of Marine Ecology, University of Washington. People like to believe they have influence over disasters, catastrophes, losses—by which they mean control—but that’s illusion, and she was done with illusion. Could she write that in her report? You’re all suffering under an illusion.

9.12 There is little in chance that meets the eye the street is dim, the moon behind clouds & Affirmation remains on the road, passing the dark trees, firs & spruces, the deer whistle in, stepping on the mayflowers & lichens, trillium & ferns, the solid world always decays, molecular structures collapse, a house of cards scattered on the ground, as Pilgrims run their beads through their hands, passing in the street upturned faces yellow in the moonlight, the way known only as what has passed,...

RECESS Flattened stone floor, covered in wooden slats, the portico with columns and even arches, not exactly the porch the other house (our same floor plan doubled into something else) had across our common grass. Theirs raised above ground where girls sit outside-inside or inside-outside, when their window, used as a door, is left open. All you can see is an opaque double window with legs, feet, and standing below. A hill behind. Often, an older couple walks, just a little lower.