Activity

We can still spend time together, she said. He stays with us, after all.

I hadn’t realized that, I said. It was very generous of her to allow it.

There’s no big drama, she told me. In fact, they were perfectly civil. It was a state of mind. At some point, it had dawned on her that the marriag…

My date that evening was with a high school science teacher. His pictures made him look athletic, in a rugged, nature-loving sort of way. I knew that these profiles rarely matched reality, but I was still disappointed to discover that he was nothing like his photographs. He was unfit and unkempt, w…

I’d finally started online dating. The idea had seemed absurd when I was even a year younger, still certain that I would eventually meet someone naturally, as if the people encountered through dating sites belonged to a different ecosystem or were not entirely human. But recently I’d begun to feel …

As the boy was clearing his throat to read, my husband whispered that it was such an honor to listen to a Nobel laureate.

“Shhh,” I told him, but I smiled.

The poems were what you might expect from a boy of twelve. There was one from the perspective of a snow leopard, on the brink of extincti…

“I toast to her future,” Ketevan said in Turkish. “Like you, I toast to her dreams. So that we may be together as a family, and we don’t have to dream of things far away.”

Of course, my toast had been a platitude, open-ended to accommodate any wish. Still, I might have imagined Natela dreaming o…