When the new shopkeeper arrived in the village he aroused great curiosity along with some scorn. He was deemed refined because his fingernails looked as if they had been varnished a tinted ivory. He had a horse, or as my father was quick to point out, a glorified pony, which he had brought from the Midlands, where he had previously worked.
It all started with the house, which looks a bit like a bird about to fly off the dune. Three levels, all almost entirely glass, jut out at angles to each other and to the beach so that every room has a view of the Atlantic. Behind the dune and the f house, off its own separate walk, is a storage shed that has no glass at all.
Emilie was talking with Bélem while looking at the gathered loud of nesting birds. “Which bird going to hatch today’s woe, guess that?” Emilie said, she said, “I’ll carry that egg to the man who took my donkey for my debt, I’ll give him that a breakfast gift!”
Boki was watching Álse Odjo with a twig broom sweep the floor. The twig-ends were breaking off and Álse Odjo kept sweeping them up. “You losing broom all over the floor!” Boki said, “I see that broom creating its own work!”
Bélem did tinker repair his bicycle by the stink-toe tree. Better to work there it smells so bad, work gets done no lazy quick. Then he rode to buy a woe shirt. He saw Mari then, standing. She said, “You going to buy that shirt, I know!
November 18, 1985—Washington Redskins quarterback Joe Theismann, thirty-six, suffers a career-ending compound fracture of the right leg on a sack by New York Giants linebacker
Each November for the past sixteen years, twenty-two men have convened at a hotel off I-95 to reenact a gruesome milestone in football history: the 1985 play
Jeff had a theory about marriage. All it is, he said, and he said he learned this too late, but all it is, is watching someone and having someone watch you. He paced in front of the mute television
Each November for the past sixteen years, a group of twenty-two men has convened at a hotel off Interstate 95 to reenact a gruesome milestone in football history: the 1985 play (known in the Washington Redskins playbook as the Throwback Special)
Whenever, like two people turned to stone, we sit down to a meal together or meet at the door at night because each of us has just remembered about locking up, I feel our sadness is an arch, a great bow extending from, one end of the world to the other—which is: from Hanna to me-and in the drawn bow an arrow aimed straight at the heart of the unmoving sky.
APPEARING HERE
SOFI, forties, lives in Los Angeles, California
EILEEN, seventies, lives in Wichita, Kansas
ELAINE, sixties, lives in Dublin, New Hampshire
GINNIE, sixties, lives in Rio Vista, California
YVETTE, sixties to seventies, lives in Midland, Michigan
SETTING
The courtyard of a medical clinic two hours north of San Francisco.
Two rows of outdoor chaise longues.
May 2019.
A “/” indicates that the next speaker’s dialogue has begun.
SCENE 13
Everyone is onstage lying on their chairs. Elaine is holding a green juice and Ginnie is reading a Thich Nhat Hanh book.
GINNIE
Here’s a provocative question.
YVETTE
Ready.