Was it really 60,000 years ago, 600 centuries, that the Nile began its modern flow, rising from June through September? Where had Marwa read that?

“Doughnut?” he said. Melting chocolate pooled in his palm like spilled oil.

The familiar double chime of the subway doors stirs me. My head enveloped in a chemical fog, my eyes refuse to focus.

The blights on the gleaming idol of perfection are being murdered on the streets right now, and you turn your already blind eyes away in hopes that you will reap the benefits of bowing down before an abomination.

​The dining room table looks like a scene from a post-apocalyptic children’s movie.

It all started, I suppose, over the summer.

That was one thing about Dave Hamilton. He never quibbled about
cashing the checks he wrote to me even though I was just a non-
employee, a diaphanous soul in the underground economy, and didn’t
exist as far as the IRS was concerned or anybody else for that matter.

Isabelle was used to formality because of her experience with Cranbrook. But, as she put on her Matriculation attire, it seemed different.

Was the universe cut from whole cloth, or was it a thing of shreds and patches?

The blistering sinus burn cuts briskly through the haze of afternoon cocktails.