By James Ralston CHARACTERS: LILLIA KRAMER: An actress HENRY VERMONT: Lillia’s partner, a writer YOUNGER HENRY: in Silver City, New Mexico YOUNGER LILLIA: traveling through Silver City GABBY: A Silver City bar-tender ALBIERTO: An off Broadway theatre entrepreneur LORRAINE:…
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In the first hour of morning, Henry David Thoreau writes in his transcendentalist masterpiece Walden, “some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.”
I’m sleeping in my clothes on Emily’s living-room couch when I wake to find her two-year-old daughter, Ariel, clutching her stuffed tyrannosaurus and staring into my eyes.
“Go for walk?” she says.
—for Raven We All Live In the Same House On the weekends I live in Cumberland, Maryland, in an old Victorian house divided into six apartments. The landlord tries to keep the place up—fresh paint, hedges trimmed—to conform to the…
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It’s morning but still dark out. It’s also raining and cold. I’m walking out of the twenty-four-hour fitness center, on my way to the all-night Waffle House, when a woman hails me from her car. She has just run away…
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IN THE MORNING, Dad feels better. Ida praises him for what he ate: a boiled egg, a piece of toast, a glass of orange juice. “Did you sleep, Dad?” I ask. “I slept OK.” “His color’s better this morning, isn’t…
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