My diagnosis allowed every doctor I saw to pretend they knew something about me. The more they knew, the less they listened to me...I could never get across that my body was a whole thing.

I have no idea if I completed whatever task I had been summoned for, but I remember the vehemence of his plea: If you know nothing else, you need to know this.

You learned to say “I need a job” in English at the JFK airport to anybody who would listen. That’s when they put a mop in your hands. So you started mopping, and then you stopped smoking, stopped drinking, or at least that’s what you told me you did. Maybe it was when you had Elizabeth, and before you had us, that you stopped having fun.

He tugs at his sleeves. Maybe he has a sister—as I have a brother—whose brain, like the zebrafish’s brain, craves that bitter swallow, that floating high.

Mid-squat above my dented desk chair, the one painted black, its wood from some long lost oak poking through, I realize I’ve left the kitchen light on. Its glow casts austere shadows down the hallway, disrupted only by a brief flicker—some fault in the fuse or simply the ghost of my better self, scolding me […]

A frog body splayed under a bench spilled its entrails just for us, the only ones here who couldn’t read them. All the birds of the last few days now seemed to augur in the Roman way—where gods’ wills could be seen in their flight, their sound, their type and grouping.