Category: Fiction

“You live in Russia, right?” asked the one who was Lucas, not out of curiosity, but politeness. He was reaching for the only thing he knew.

“Not anymore,” I said. I almost launched into a story about my days in an Eastern Orthodox monastery but remembered myself. I didn’t want to speak more than necessary. I wanted to save my words for Joey.

“Are you a communist?” Damien asked.

“No,” I replied.

When the malediction really began, no human could really say. But for its most recent victim, it began one cold morning at the bank of a river.

They began hanging out. The mode of engagement with Rotho was always hanging out, always at his house. And why would he ever leave? The place was giant, fit for the Von Trapps, and full of hard-bodied men coming in and out in the midst of impassioned speech: “depends on which Van Halen” or “oeuvre.”

We talked about work without pay and pay without work. I mentioned an article that said that E. M. Forster had been granted a an honorary fellow position at King’s College, Cambridge, for twenty years without publishing another novel, but you pointed out that that still depended on a certain amount of pedigree and prestige prior to that point and I said it was true.