Category: Creative Nonfiction

Being a legal drug runner made you realize you wanted to start your own delivery service, so you bought a cargo van we couldn’t afford even though we already had two cars and I didn’t say anything about that purchase, like how a few months later when I took you to the mental health crisis center at 2 a.m. because you ripped the glass top off your metal desk—eyes all textbook crazy-like, top lip twitching, me praying you would just get on medication already because your moods and paranoia were always my fault, of course, because even though I was asleep that night I had somehow pissed you off, somehow incited your rage while I slept—and I didn’t say anything when you told the social worker at the mental health crisis center that you had a plan.

“I mean, we’re not that close now, but he’s the guy who will take me to the hospital at the end of my life when I’m dying. I married him for that. For the end. And, of course, for the children. He’ll be the one to take me when I need chemo.”

“Do you have cancer?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

In truth, I couldn’t argue that everything here wasn’t a little different.

I should have been smart enough to realize something most peculiar was up if I had noticed that the title page of Joy Williams short story in the Sept 30th New Yorker was all in small caps, both title and author’s name. That can be taken as a signal of formal innovation, an expectation that is most often disappointed, only not in this case.