Noah’s never any good without coffee. Two blocks from the high school is a Dunkin’ Donuts, and he races there every day before school so he’s five minutes late to class. He chugs the large black coffee while jogging to campus. His tattered blue backpack with a Dave Matthews Band patch that he resolutely thinks is cool bounces on his bony shoulders. At this Western Massachusetts high school, the Dave Matthews fans are the palest of the pale, and the school is mostly populated with dishwater blonde, lanky, quiet Polish American kids. Noah’s black curls and caterpillar eyebrows don’t do

MARATHON  I read that this year’s New York City Marathon will be run single file, to kind of shake things up.  FOUND  I found a hat on the sidewalk and I think it might belong to you or someone with a similarly shaped head.  HULK HOGAN I partnered with Hulk Hogan for a while, until I realized he was using up all my gasoline, liquor, dynamite, and toilet paper. Eventually I started to realize that there is an upside to being alone in the world. No, wait, hear me out. There is.  THE BIBLE  Out of sight, out of mind,

For a dollar, paid to a taciturn man from the nearest town, hikers could pass the night in the abandoned Soviet summer camp. Mattresses were strewn across the base of a drained indoor swimming pool where the heat pump regurgitated the same frigid air, offering in its spittle only the added scent of sweet, spoiled beef. Although there were no windowpanes in the floor-to-ceiling gaps that hailed in bad weather, the roof, together with the dip of the pool, offered some facsimile of shelter.  To the credit of our mysterious property mogul, the back-wall of the room was adorned entirely

25th November As I spoon potato and spinach into Henry’s open mouth the 5Live DJ stops talking about death tourism and asks, ‘to what lengths have you gone to get back something  you’ve lost?’ It is a quarter to one in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Alex is at work, Henry and I are at home. I’ll try to get him to sleep after he’s finished eating. He is teething, and going through a sleep regression, and responding by rubbing his head so hard on his mattress at bedtimes that he gives himself friction burns, red-raw coins at the centre

“Lurch to dispatch.” “Go ahead.” “Hey dispatch, we’ve got a problem up in European.” “What do you mean problem?” “I missed that last part, can you repeat?” “What problem?” “Yeah, up in European.” “Lurch, what’s the problem?” Lurch, a looming young man, new haircut, eyes slightly at odds with one another, handsome, stands in a corner of the museum’s European collection. He was only hired on a few weeks ago, but is catching on fairly quickly. Walk around, ask mothers to keep their children at arms length, no touching, no running. They’re no longer called security guards because of an

And so I was walking, as if away from something, although there was nowhere to go, nowhere to leave to, only the road outside the Airbnb to walk down once again. It was dusty, a thin strip of asphalt in the dusty town, a grid of maybe eight roads, a flash of a town in the Mojave. We’d been in the Airbnb for seven days, expected to stay only four, but the Emergency Event, which had precipitated our departure, had not diminished.  It was still unsafe at home, and if not literally unsafe, potentially unsafe, it was possible the Event