Sublime

Maybe the mayor would call me up. When I was a kid, the mayor was an exuberant man who, like my mother, was Jewish and dusky, who favored pale suits, and even now when I hear of a generic mayor it’s him that I see. Kid, he’d say. How could you have let this happen? How could you have allowed your elderly parents to live in this shithole? What

“Fear of violent death,” he said, “is a bourgeois idea put upon you from the day you are born.”

“What did you put in there to scare them?” I ask Beckett. “Nothing.” “Nothing?” Beckett takes another swig from the cider. “Maybe they’re afraid of their own stupidity.”

It is with the lions that I learn to not be afraid of the children. I like the idea of them, but the first time that I see them in person, they dart up to the fence in swarms. Their hands reach out to me. Their eyes are wet. Their voices call out. Alhimar alwahshiu! Alhimar alwahshiu! I am afraid to let them touch me. On the first day, it feels

“Dan,” Jack said, “NO ONE KNOWS.” And that was the worst of all. It was another way of saying never-never-never.

I had a Caribbean American friend who was a waitress, and her father was a veteran. Every time she went to a restaurant—every single time—she had to wonder if they were going to get good service or be seated in the back and ignored.

She did not like how he went through life so scared of everything

Ever since moving to North Korea, I’d never felt truly alive; part of me had been walled off, silenced. After a while, I felt that that part of me had simply withered away like a limb that atrophies from lack of use. I pondered the terror that had dominated my life—the never-ending surveillance; the lack of autonomy; the fear of expressing an

Then he was sorry for the great fish that had nothing to eat and his determination to kill him never relaxed in his sorrow for him. How many people will he feed, he thought. But are they worthy to eat him?