I remembered weeping, although it never happened, as quietly as possible in a bathroom stall at a fancy restaurant in Madrid, my blood a patchwork of sertraline, tetrahydrocannabinol, clonazepam, and Rioja.

It is sad work to build a diorama of the future with a boy you know will hang himself for whatever complex of reasons in his parents’ basement at nineteen, but that work has been assigned, Mrs. Greiner standing over us to check our progress, the synthetic coconut odor of her lotion intermingling with the smell of rubber cement. I’ll make Daniel’s

Days passed like this: turning in around sunrise, waking a couple of hours before sunset, my only contact with other humans the few words I exchanged with the attendant at the gas station where I continued to buy groceries,

Somehow destroying the fabricated correspondence made it seem real; how many authors have burned their letters? Abandoning the book about forging my archive left me feeling as though I actually possessed one, as though I were protecting my past from the exposure of publication.

Say they join his family—parents,

We would supplement IUIs with coitus during the period of ovulation or vice versa, both to maximize our chances and, although neither of us said it, because we could then narrate conception, if it occurred, as at least potentially independent of the institution.

The world to come

Another historic storm had failed to arrive, as though we lived outside of history or were falling out of time.

On the flat-screen hung high up on the wall, we see the image of the coming storm, its limbs moving in real time, the brain visible in its translucent skull. The doctor dwells on the rapidly beating heart, then lets us hear it at high volume.