Now the boat plows on—the ocean heaving like a breast laboring for breath—
a black flag beating from its bow, past cliff sides dotted with green, shrubs like tumbleweeds blown down from above.
Beyond, the city skyline—skyscrapers sheered off by mist…

Three years had passed, since I’d seen Arlen. Then one night, I got a call from her telling me Harry was in the intensive care unit at Kaiser in critical condition. I sped over to the hospital, where she drew me into a foyer to tell what had happened.
Harry hadn’t gotten the teaching post…

One night I had a dream unlike any I’d ever had before. In it, I felt a strange, acute mental anguish that was entirely different from any conscious feeling I’d ever experienced. In the dream, I went to my grandmother, who was deceased, and asked, “Someone else in the family…

The next morning Roberta came round to enlist volunteers for a Dada art performance. Seely had buried her head in her requisition book and frowned with feigned concentration, trying to appear too busy to be conscripted. But when she saw Stuart dragging a splintered chair…

I’m hard, congealed anxiety, poised on the edge of a chair. My hands are shaking, feeling so barely assembled, I half-expect my fingers and thumbs to start dropping off. I’m so nervous I can’t remember which foot to put on the stool; so, after an eternity of indecision, I…

At one of the guest lectures I attended, painter Nathan Oliveira described an evening when he’d presented a slide show of his work to a number of artist friends. “Why, you’ve got a whole exhibition’s worth here!” they’d enthused. “But they’re all the same painting!”...