They were in the smaller, formal mess⁠—far enough off the main grid that you could forget for a second that you were living at the end of eight miles of tunnels.

Before the crash, they’d had different ideas about their own resilience, and each other’s.

He didn’t drink because he was an alcoholic, and he didn’t write poetry because he wasn’t good at it.

By the time we finally reached the Castro, I genuinely believed Anne had gotten rich off being gay alone.

It is very cold outside, though less so inside the car, it seems, with the kufiyya lying across the dashboard, forming a coiled snake ready to strike.

They checked in at the hotel that A. called in his head Hotel Auschwitz, then he spent twenty minutes shitting.

There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.

At first, the descriptor “Unemployed, Age 34” had sounded almost like a criminal charge, but I’d gotten used to it soon enough.

“I said, you know, thank goodness it’s not autism,” Jenny said, so exuberantly that it took Marion a moment to register the joke.

On day fifty-one, a person on the radio said, For many Americans, this is the defining crisis of our lives, but all I had done that day was eat sugared mango slices and write a list.