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I dreamed I was sitting in a tiled bathhouse. Late afternoon light poured through a high window, and water was seeping under the door, slowly filling the room, mounting higher and higher. Then the door opened and a wall of water gushed in, and through the same door my brother also came, but it wasn…

Left alone, I washed up, changed into the Dr. Seuss shirt, got in bed, and started writing in my notebook. I kept thinking about the uneven quality of time—the way it was almost always so empty, and then with no warning came a few days that felt so dense and alive and real that it seemed indisputab…

"A HAT, A HAT, A BEAUTIFUL HAT,” she said, pulling me to the stands that sold baskets and other straw goods.

I felt some irrational primal resistance toward letting her buy me a hat, even though it was clear, or should have been clear, that this was the only way we would ever be able to move on …

“Yes, of course!” I noticed then that she was wearing a tiny backpack with both straps on. I suppressed a sigh. Hungary felt increasingly like reading War and Peace: new characters came up every five minutes, with their unusual names and distinctive locutions, and you had to pay attention to them f…

When Vivie apologized for eating slowly, Béla said that eating slowly was good: “If you eat slowly, you can feel the food.”

“You don’t feel food,” Owen said, “you taste it.”

“Yes,” Béla said. “But I also mean more than to taste it.”

“You enjoy it,” suggested Daniel. “If you eat slowly, you…