project/stunt-story
Jennifer Egan,
Percival Everett,
James Salter,
Miranda July,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Ingmar Bergman,
Mavis Gallant,
Clifford Odets,
Jenny Erpenbeck,
Jay McInerney
Stark: I thought of you all last night. I was walking on the boardwalk and I thought of you. Do you know what the waves are saying?
Cleo: What?
Stark: Your name ...
Cleo: Well, were you walking alone?
Stark: No.
Cleo: With your wife?
Stark: Yes ... (There is a pause; Cleo walks to the water cooler.)
oh god
Stark (quietly): Much more mine. I don't know what happened. I thought about these things a lot these past few months. You expect many things from marriage, but I can't give them. I feel a moral obligation but I don't know what to do. These scenes go on. We're always worried ... we're two machines counting up the petty cash. Something about me cheats you -- I'm not the man to help you be the best woman it's in you to be. So your attitude's justified. I know I owe you a lot, Belle --
Prince: What can he offer you? He loves you -- his memoirs are written on his face. But I see a big chapter heading: "No Divorce." Why not? Ten years they're married. She runs his life like a credit manager. They lost a child together ... they're attached underground by a hundred different roots. But if he left her -- as he knows -- could he leave his practice? Never! Then you'd be a credit manager ... But why go on? He won't leave her. That needs courage, strength, and he's not strong.
:( :(
My brother dies several times a month.
It’s always my mother who phones to inform me of his passing.
“Your brother’s not answering my calls,” she says in a whisper.
To her, the telephone bears witness to our permanence on Earth, so if there’s no answer, the only possible explanation is the cessation of all vital functions.
When she calls to tell me my brother is gone, she’s not looking for reassurance. Instead she wants me to share in her grief. Suffering together is her form of happiness; misery shared is misery relished.
Sometimes the cause of death is banal: a gas leak, a head-on collision, a broken neck from a bad fall.
honestly top-tier opening