We have come together, the Board Chair begins, for obvious reasons. In a time of great division, this table— he raps his knuckles against the oak for emphasis
He was an Italian whom she had met a few days earlier at a bar. Now she was on the back of his motorcycle as they rode down Sunset Boulevard. She wore a black dress, black heels, and a black motorcycle jacket with a wine-red-colored lining...
He sat there in the pit, chanting and humming and carving sepulchers for an ancient warrior class of genocidal aliens, and did not even look up to acknowledge his captors.
Silvio, whom everyone called El Sapo, had been coming the longest, but only during the wet times when the fields ran muddy and no one else would brave the kind of cold that would lock your knuckles, no matter how thick the gloves.
Joy seems hard to sustain these days if you’re paying close enough attention to the world around you. A somber mood with which to kick off a Summer Fiction issue, but it lands amid crises both familiar and new.