Sublime

She’d said lucky people found the work they were meant to do. Unlucky people found love.

bucolic

inchoate

gregarious.

Within a five-block radius of my apartment there are four first-run multiplexes and a dozen thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors, and genres. These are the mom-and-pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of The Honeymoon Killers even if I’m the only one

One night, before she went home from the library, Lina found a room of cookbooks. She wrote down a California chef’s salad dressing recipe and made it in a jar. Her dinner tasted like a dish in a restaurant Sometimes, now, she was happy.

May you not go around the world looking to fill what you fear you lack with the flesh of another human being. That’s part of what this story is for.

An air altogether of occupying a time not his own – might he be more at ease in an Edwardian dining room, say, or on a pitching clipper’s deck? Very likely.

Not handsome, exactly—in fact, he teetered on the edge of ugly: short and slightly stocky, with thinning black hair. But his skin was deeply tanned, as though he flew to the Mediterranean instead of the endless Minneapolis-Detroit-Chicago route, and his thick lips were sensual, his teeth startling white. He exuded a vitality and alertness that was