The past few weeks had required an extraordinary amount of understanding impossible situations. Sometimes she tried to ground herself by recalling old facts. She’d been lying awake at three in the morning, trying to remember if Mina Loy was the poet or the actress in The Thin Man movies. She googled Mina Loy and read…

She wrapped glass lemons in wool socks. She stuffed old photos in the pages of books that she had already read. She filled suitcases with shoes and shoeboxes with silverware. She smiled at the wonderful things friends had gifted her over the years—a plastic crow, a ceramic skull, a woven meditation rug, a terracotta bowl…

The long late night train ride home did not bother her, even if it was the second time she had to make the trip back to Brooklyn that day. She could already imagine the new route she would soon take that would bring her to her own home, her healed self. Her head hurt a…

She had been second. All week she had been reading a book with a narrator who may be the last woman alive or may be crazy or may be both crazy and the last woman alive. All week she had been reading a book about confusing representations of the world with the real world. All…

The streets teemed with people enjoying dinner, enjoying entertainment, enjoying each other and the weather, which had finally broken. It was only Tuesday, but no one was bothered by the days of the week still to come. She and a friend went to a small Italian restaurant that had been in operation for over a…

Once, someone had told her to “act as if I said nothing.” Since then, she often thought about what life would have been like if she had been able to do just that. And how it would not erase the thing that was said. The words would have still been spoken, still had their word…