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In the summer, things picked up. I took a plastic lawn chair out to the parking lot and moved it throughout the day so I was always in the sun. Being inside, ready to greet customers, was not a requirement. I could just chase after them at the last minute. People would drive in from San Francisco t…

Another call flashed on my phone. I glanced at the bills on my table. I didn’t recognize the phone number but guessed it was my student loan company, a debt collection company, or the prerecorded voice of the woman who called me nine times each day from one of my credit cards.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I blubbered a bit. Just out of one eye, which had stuff coming out of it anyway, because of Fish Rot.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Your evals are OK. We don’t care much what students say around here. They can suck it.”

I fel…

Peter! I see you. Through the thin walls of my ground-floor studio, through glazed windows covered on the outside with steel lattice to keep out burglars and birds, I see you emerging onto the front lawn on a fresh spring morning in Massachusetts, as a robin pecks for worms and a squirrel scampers …

[...] I, too, can almost imagine a dialogue, an ongoing symposium latently emerging among the drone operating personnel, the way blossoms from a tree planted in a sheltered courtyard, with sun coming only from the west, bloom late, only as afternoon light lengthens.