What Happened

Remorse – is Memory – awake

Her Parties all astir -

A Presence of Departed Acts -

At window – and at Door -

-Emily Dickinson, No. 781 (Franklin), (1863)

 

WHAT HAPPENED

 

She wasn’t sure if her joke went over, or if it was in fact a joke, though she had meant it as one, when she turned to him and…

 

“So falls the youth; his arms the fall resound,” read the fine print on Bible paper in the compact blue book, the smallest Greg could find in the tent the afternoon he…

 

For a while I have been meaning to write you, turning over these things that have happened, things that ten years ago I wouldn’t have hesitated to call “events,” but which now…

 

Then he was gone, and what came to replace him was simply the air of that May evening, calming us where we sat on the patio, speaking of nothing in particular with a certain unease, a certain…

 

It was one of those whispers you only partly overhear, unsure if it is part of a campaign, bristling with insistent use of the words “now,” “quick,” “no,” and “tonight,” but otherwise as undecipherable as the static coming from…

 

We met on the Internet, but all through the date I couldn’t shake the sinister sense that we were related, that he was, perhaps…

 

For weeks I have thought of the drive home from work as a time for meditation in which I empty my mind and allow my eyes to focus on the colorful detailing of the suburban homes and the lush vegetation planted around them, and I begin to feel I am listening to the thoughts of the dwellers within, I alone…

 

“I come from a competitive family that hates foreigners, so it’s kind of strange that I joined the Peace Corps—I guess that just makes me the black sheep, or at least the one that…

 

As we sat in the hospital, the fact that we had both seen the other bleed made our shared silences somehow spacious, if you know what I’m trying…