Activity

“Now, what makes you think about him less?”

There were really only degrees of more, but I tried to think of what was the opposite of looking him up.

“Maybe your work?” Jordi suggested.

“What work?”

Our eyes met; she looked quietly terrified for me. Obviously a person like me, like us, c…

“These people always think they really know you,” Harris said, ripping off a piece of Friday’s waffle and putting it in his mouth. “They can’t separate the actual person from the work.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to slap him, hard. The real me is in my work. Any fan of my work know…

But he stopped in that doorway, reaching a hand inside he snapped on the bright light which flung a heavier shadow across the floor to her. —Listen, this guilt, this secrecy, he burst out, —it has nothing to do with this . . . this passion for wanting to meet the latest poet, shake hands with the l…

“He’s a doctor,” said Meriel. She was about to start explaining about the funeral, the accident, the flight down from Smithers, but the conversation was taken away from her.

“But I’m not here officially, don’t worry,” the doctor said.

“Oh, no,” said Aunt Muriel. “You’re here with her.”

“Ye…

“Then I saw your car parked at the motel. And I knew. This thing was on.”

“On?”

“Or did I read you all wrong?”

If this age, forty-five, turned out to be the halfway point of my life, then this moment right now was the exact midpoint. A body rises, reaches an apex, and then falls—but at the…