SHINING THROUGH

In 1940 when I was thirty-one and an old maid, while the whole world waited for war, I fell in love with John Berringer.

An office crush. Big deal. Since the invention of the steno pad, a day hasn't gone by without some secretary glancing up from her Pitman squiggles and suddenly realizing that the man who was mumbling "... and therefore pursuant to the above... " was the one man in her life who could ever bring her joy.

So there I was, a cliche with a number 2 yellow pencil: a working girl from Queens who'd lost her heart to the pride of the Ivy League.
Susan Isaacs

The character became more real to me when I heard that Melanie Griffiths was playing her in the movie. Before that I think I fell for the old maid connotation. But, I do not like the movie version because they consolidate the the characters of John Berringer and his son.

THE LOVE WE SHARE WITHOUT KNOWING

Everything you think you know about the world isn't true. Nothing is real, it's all made up. We live in a world of illusion. I'm telling you this up front because I don't want you thinking this story is going to have a happy ending. It won't make any sense out of sadness. It won't redeem humanity in even a small sort of way.
Christopher Barzak

I WAS TOLD THERE WOULD BE CAKE

As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day. Say someone pushes me onto the subway tracks. Or I get accidentally blown up. Or a woman with a headset and a baby carriage wheels over my big toe, backing me into some scaffolding, which shakes loose a lead pipe, which lands on my skull. What then? After the ambulance, the hospital, the funeral, the trays of cheese cubes on foil toothpicks...
Sloane Crosley

DEATH IN THE GARDEN

Friday 4th December

Today at half-past two in the afternoon I was acquitted of the murder of my husband.

Five minutes earlier I had known I was to die. The certainty was absolute that what I have lived through in the last half year could only lead to death and a death timed, certain, ritualised...
Elizabeth Ironside

THE KEPT MAN

I have been waiting for my husband to die for six years.

Martin has been in a coma ever since he knocked his head --- hard, of course, it's not as though he just bumped it one day and then was (almost) gone forever --- in his studio. First there was an aneurysm, an explosion of sorts in his brain, and then he fell from the ladder he was standing on, fifteen feet up in the air, knocking his head on a painting, another one next to it, the edge of an easel, and finally landing solidly on a paint can, a serene blue oil, that tipped over and spilled forth, mixing with the blood that began to ripple from his head, so when I found him --- oh yes, I found him, when I came back from my morning walk on the waterfront, maybe an hour after the fall, but don't worry, if I had gotten home earlier it wouldn't have made a difference the doctors have told me, he was completely f***ed on impact --- I at first thought he was merely sleeping in a sea of paint, a mix gone bad. (Purple? He hated purple.) It wouldn't have been the first time he had napped on the floor of his studio. He spent nights there sometimes, instead of walking through one doorway, and then another, into our bed.
Jamie Attenberg

SUITE FRANÇAISE

Hot thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near, and the war was far away. The first to hear the alarm were those who couldn't sleep--the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved. To them it began as a long breath, like air being forced into a deep sigh. It wasn't long before its wailing filled the sky. It came from afar, from beyond the horizon, slowly, almost lazily. Those asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pepples, a March storm whipping the woods, a herd of cows trampling the ground with their hooves, until finally sleep was shaken off, and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, "Is it an air raid?"
Irène Némirovsky

AHAB'S WIFE: OR, THE STAR-GAZER

Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last. Yet, looking up--into the clouds--I conjure him there: his gray-white hair; his gathered brow; and the zaggy mark (I saw it when lying with him by candlelight and, also, taking our bliss on the sunny moor among curly-cup gumweed and lamb's ear). And I see a zaggy shadow now in the rifting clouds. That mark started like lightning at Ahab's temple and ran not all the way to his heel (as some thought) but ended at Ahab's heart.
Sena Jeter Naslund