* * *
■ ■ ■
One hundred years ago, her cat might have been called Mittens or Pussywillow. Now her cat was called Dr. Butthole. There was no way out of it. “Dr. Butthole,” she called at night, almost in despair, until he trotted to the door with the bright feathers of her dignity clinging to his lips and disappeared in his alternating stripes over the threshold.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In Bristol the sunset dripped as if from a honeycomb. “This is your contribution to society?” a man asked, holding up a printout of the Can a dog be twins? post.
“Yes,” she peeped. She wanted to explain that she had also popularized the concept of a “sealing wax manicure,” where you painted over your entire fingertip in a big careless red blob, and that this had paved the way for 1776-core, an irony-based aesthetic where people adopted various visual signifiers of the Founding Fathers, but he had already turned away in disgust, tearing the printout in two as he went. Just as well. It probably wouldn’t be funny to an Englishman anyway.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Afterward, a boyish figure stood in line to see her; he waited till the very end. “I used to read your diary,” he confessed when it was finally his turn, and tears sparked in her eyes instantaneously. The diary she had written before anything had happened to her! The diary where she used to make the sort of jokes that would get people fired now!
“What was your name?” she asked, and he told her, and a mundane ecstasy began to rush in her veins—his had been one of her very favorite lives. She remembered it in the minutest detail: the pints after work, the rides back and forth on the train, his search for ever spicier curries, the imagined dimness of his apartment with its crates of obscure records, the green waving gentleness of it all. She stood up and held him, she could not help it. He felt as breakable as a link in her arms.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Our mothers could not stop using horny emojis. They used the winking one with its tongue out on our birthdays, they sent us long rows of the spurting three droplets when it rained. We had told them a thousand times, but they never listened—as long as they lived and loved us, as long as they had split themselves open to have us, they would send us the peach in peach season.
NEVER SEND ME THE EGGPLANT AGAIN, MOM! she texted. I DON’T CARE WHAT YOU’RE COOKING FOR DINNER!
* * *
■ ■ ■
Two women on the bench next to her in the park were discussing the power of the eclipse. The theme of their discussion was: would you go blind? Would you go blind if you went outside during an eclipse and stared at the ground the whole time? Would your dogs go blind if you were walking them? Should you pull the curtains closed with a snap so your cats couldn’t see? Would, one of the women advanced in a timid tone, a picture of it make you blind if you looked at it later? Would a painting of it, a paragraph that described it to the letter? If you went blind when you were very very old, how would you know that it wasn’t the eclipse that had somehow done it? Traveled along with you, side by side, in a black-and-flame silence and biding its time?
* * *
■ ■ ■
Of course when the eclipse came, the dictator stared directly into it, as if to say that nature had no dominion over him either.
* * *
■ ■ ■
It was hard to know which forms of protest against the current regime were actually useful. The day after the election her husband had woken up with the strong urge to get a face tattoo. “Either I want a teardrop under my right eye or I want them to make my whole skull visible.” He settled finally on getting the words STOP IT in very small letters right near his hairline, where they could hardly be seen.
* * *
■ ■ ■
In remembrance of those we lost on 9/11 the hotel will provide complimentary coffee and mini muffins from 8:45–9:15 am
* * *
■ ■ ■
Previously these communities were imposed on us, along with their mental weather. Now we chose them—or believed that we did. A person might join a site to look at pictures of her nephew and five years later believe in a flat earth.
* * *
■ ■ ■
Strange: there were more and more stories about Nazi hunters, about women luring Nazis out to the woods with promises of sex and then shooting them, women at the gates of Auschwitz stripping to distract the guards and then wrestling their guns away from them with one deft nude move. Where had these stories been during her childhood? Those stories had mostly been about people in attics eating one potato a week. But these sex-and-murder-in-the-woods stories—they would have put a different shine on things.