Glimmer Train Stories, #101

Excerpts:

Peter Parsons
No One There, No One to Talk to, Nothing to Say
I feel I have to bless everyone else I know who has died, and I start naming grandparents, relatives, friends, and how about those who haven't died.

Alicia Oltuski
Let's Take It from the Top
"Don't call Dom," my father said to me. I wished he hadn't. Dom had known what to do the time Dad forgot how to swallow for two days, and I suspected she would have known what to do here.

George Makana Clark
Pluto
Some people complain that snoring keeps them awake, but there's a rhythm to it, a repetition that says, I trust you, I trust you with my life.

Tori Malcangio
Donna of Mesker Park Zoo
Brokaw knows his parents went to bed on November 1 and didn't wake up on November 2. They both stopped breathing because sometimes the gorillas won't mate and sometimes the turnstiles don't work and that's that.

Katherine Easer
Parade of Cats
Before he met me, Brandon thought Taiwanese people spoke Thai, and all Asians looked alike. He had never dated anyone who wasn't Aryan, though this wasn't by design.

Courtney Knowlton
Mean Blonde Ponytail Girl
I hoped that I could one day do something so generous for my children, but there was a good chance that we'd never be able to. We were teachers, and I was a spender.

Cady Vishniac
Remainders
Our shul was a permissive environment, so reasonable and rule free we had trouble thinking up ways to rebel.

Dan Murphy
In Miniature
Let's warp speed to feeling okay, okay? Let's get straight back to feeling ... anything other than this.

Jennifer Wortman
Love You. Bye.
But it could happen, I say. By your own admission, you never know. She stares at me, her dark eyes darkening. I'm her longtime depressive friend. Why am I on the side of hope?

Nikole Beckwith
The Beginning
And then the emergency siren stopped. It was meant to sound three short bursts to punctuate safety, as if to say "The End," but the bursts never came. Just silence.

Valeria Luiselli
Interview by David Naimon
That is what it means, in fact, to translate. It comes from the Latin translatio, which means to move something, to carry it over, to transfer it, to take it on a trip from A to B. I think of translation in those terms. I think of many practices as forms of translation.

Eric Boehling Lewis
Blue Ridge
Years ago your grandmother told you that the happiest period in her life had slid by, disguised as tedium. Only after the Soviet police killed her husband did she realize she'd been living in a kind of heaven.

Oguz Dinc
The Hurricane
We are way behind Americans when it comes to disaster preparation, maybe because we are ahead in fatalism.