CAMP HAPPINESS

They were going to separate—she wanted to and he was done fighting her—but before that there was Dylan’s bar mitzvah, and before that was now: this weekend in the rolling hills beyond Oakland with similarly bereaved Jewish strangers.

Coywolf

Hebrew, Lizavetta claimed, was the holiest and most beautiful language in the world. Alexey trusted her in most things, but he knew for a fact this couldn’t be so, because Lermontov had written his poems in Russian.

Night Running

And so they ran, like lunatics, around the neighborhood, in t-shirts and boots, in the middle of the night, in the middle of winter.

Love Will Not Save You

For years after, you will ask yourself, Should I have held her that night? Do you hold someone who tells you this? You won’t remember holding her…

The Empty Chair

After dinner his father would sit across the formica kitchen table and fire words at him. Bellicose, symbiosis, cartilaginous, revenant. The rule was, he did not have to go to bed until he got a word wrong.

Life So Good

There was another picture of her at their wedding. Two young boys in coffee-colored suits stood behind them, holding guitars way too big for their bodies, surrounded by a crowd of what must have been a hundred, their priest dressed in white toasting them with a big glass of red wine.