No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story.
Marina: I saw history the day I decided to go back to Virginia. I came out of the farmacia, where some women in their black hose, long-sleeved dresses, and scarves, like my mother-in-law, circled around its door and talked only to each other. Once through the small crowd, I looked down Grand across the river to New York; its spikes snagged the clouds. I told myself, Marina, it’s time to go, the war’s on.
The scents of September: ripe blackberries, garden fires, whiteboard marker pens. The start of the school year used to be thrilling, back when Fiona McNeel was a special girl full of promise sitting up front asking clever questions. Now she’d be the one fielding the clever questions, and looking silly if she couldn’t answer them. But how clever could they be, her new students? No more than fifteen in each section (they boasted about class size in the Barrow School brochures) twelve and thirteen year olds, eager to learn and easy to mold. And the classroom was not a bad place to work, a large, airy room with big windows overlooking maple trees and playing fields.
Deadlines Extended
Take surveys, determine eligibility,
The orders come and are tiring,
The means-tested world is mean
As the rusty gate to the Municipal Office opened with a squeak, Agha hobbled in. His arthritic joints protested each step, but he trudged forward.
They sent me to Moura, I think, because I’d been shoving MDMA in my school shoes and bombing it in the disabled toilets at lunch. Could have been anything, though. Just a guess. There’s a limit to the number of times you can get back to third period maths, all pupils, wired on the slow turn of a clock’s hour hand. ‘Can you come with me, Kieran?’ someone asked. Could not for the life of me tell you who it was, though. When it came time for a response – which I think whoever’d asked had been waiting on for a few minutes, or maybe just seconds – as to why this was all happening, I shrugged. ‘Laryngitis?’ I wondered out loud, because I was fucked if I knew what the symptoms were. Anyway, where was I again? Moura.
Mr. Barnevald left Mr. Evans for a Miss Kruger, a delicious rose of a woman, as Mr. Barnevald described her.