Status Updates From Antarktida

Whatever you say, I’ll manage. I will live out of a water barrel and check the skies. I will learn fifteen types of wind and know the weight of ttomorrow’s rain by the rustle in the sycamores. Make nettle soup and dandelion bread, ask for nothing. And I won’t comfort you. I will not be the woman who shelters her man same as he’s a boy. That part of my people ends with me.

I was your Christmas fling, a thing to break the boredom of the holidays, and you were mine. But now these suitcases have the weight of anchors on this floor I learned to walk on. It may be I’m back for good.

A snarl of angry yellow taxis clotted the intersections on the streets below.

She talked as if she could reach out through the past and touch it with her hands.

She heard them falling, imagined the stem weakening, the fruit clinging to its source, losing, loosening, letting go, falling, falling.

The speed at which I panicked reading the first story is legendary.