Activity

Commencement

They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agno…

After eating, Chester would, as a rule, spend twenty minutes contemplating his own unhappiness, its nature and its depth. This was like dropping a stone into an old quarry and waiting for the eventual splash, except every year the wait was longer, and while he waited the empty sound of loneliness s…

At about the same time, Lucilla began to blag the occasional celebrity interview, the proceeds of which she squandered on new clothes for both of them: for her, little patterned sundresses and great clunky shoes; for Chester, Paul Smith safari suits and gut-tight rollnecks.

Thus refashioned, the…

For Chester, who had never been abroad, it was all a delight and a revelation. Sitting in a bar the afternoon before they left, he looked around at the French people with their long, dark hair and unusual raincoats and thought how strange they seemed in some ways, but in other, more important ways,…

It had taken quite a while for Chester’s growing girth and his continuing refusal to set a date to complicate this thinking. In the previous eighteen months they had attended twelve weddings, five christenings and a bris. The effects had been incremental; each on its own did not trouble her but tak…