Nothing about this business park, this new address, suggests early instruments, but the owner of the agency has two firms under one roof. So, as he completes the tuning of my prospective clavichord, we are surrounded by factory safetywear catalogues. I’ve been here before to buy humidifiers, which…
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‘We meet at various points in the great swathes of the past that neither of us were alive to witness.’
Allen Bratton on a daytrip to a castle with his older boyfriend.
‘Listening to three white poets, whom I suspect are academics, talk about the state of poetry.’
Oluwaseun Olayiwola eavesdrops on an older generation.
‘I’d been dubious about his company at first.’
Sarah Moss on watching Shakespeare with her twelve-year-old son.
‘She didn’t trust us because, to her, tenants were like children.’
Kate Zambreno on negotiating with her older landlady.
‘A moment now swallowed in embarrassment, I asked a question only a young person might ask an older one.’
Lynne Tillman on trying to understand what makes a generation.
‘Some people said they were not ‘with’ the students. They were not in favour of the use of arms. But they were of one voice in saying that the students were their sons, and that if the army came in the students would be put to death. That was why they kept saying: “Tell the truth about us.”’
‘I wanted to see a communist victory, which I presumed to be inevitable. I wanted to see the fall of a city.’
‘It was the Cuba of the future. It was going the way of Iran. It was another Nicaragua, another Cambodia, another Vietnam.’
‘Most of his life has been spent under Marcos's rule, and his habit of thought was to doubt the story as presented in, say, the newspaper, and to try to guess the story behind the story.’
‘She is well-behaved, as icons go, she toes the party line.’
Short fiction by the author of Our Wives Under the Sea.
