The sign in the Sweet Apple kitchen declared it a nut-free zone, and every September somebody, almost always a dad, cracked the usual stupid joke. The gag, Laura, the school director, told Tovah, would either mock the school’s concern for potentially lethal legumes or else suggest that despite the sign’s assurance, not everyone at Sweet Apple could boast of sanity.

Today, as Tovah leaned into the fridge to adjust the lunch bag heap, a skinny gray-haired man in a polo shirt, old enough to be the grandfather of the girl who called him “Papa” as he nudged her toward the cubbies, winked at Tovah, pointed to the sign.

Here it came, the annual benediction.

Winter was coming and Herbert was afraid that he had not adequately prepared. It was an abstract and, in many ways, absurd fear, given that his radiator functioned perfectly and his checking account was plentiful, given that for long stretches of winter one could simply forget about the weather roiling outside. One could stay inside. Herbert was a man for whom the Internet meme “first world problems” had been coined. Recently, at a literary event in East Atlanta Village, a local author had juxtaposed the image of hipsters wallowing in self-induced poverty with that of AIDS-ravaged sub-Saharan Africans, as if to say to Herbert, and people like Herbert, boy, do you have it good. And he had not taken it personally. Indeed, he had laughed as loud as anyone. He did have it good.

I once hung out with this shit group of kids and they were just such shit.

This to say I made some mistakes.

Like breaking into this one guy’s car.

Like stealing the stereo out of that car.

I was young and I didn’t steal the stereo because I wanted the stereo.

I stole it, rather, because I wanted the guy.

This to say I just wanted some thing the guy owned.

This more to say that nothing else mattered in that moment except this thing the guy owned, this thing that, I now know, was not the guy.

We had only been sleeping together for a couple of months when he died of a sudden, inexplicable, deadly illness with no known treatment which killed him before I’d even heard he’d been hospitalized. The day after he died a friend of a friend let me know, a girl I’d never met whose voice kept breaking up. I’d thought it was bad reception. She was sobbing. I didn’t know what to say so I hung up and went to the bar.

“How terrible,” people at the bar said.

It was terrible.

“You must be shocked.”

I was shocked.

Over the next weeks, Nilanthi listened silently as the village praised her luck. Women who had known her mother rested their palms on her dirty hair and whispered blessings and wishes and called out to the memory of her mother. Nilanthi found it amusing that people treated mutes as if they had lost their ability to hear after their voices disappeared. In her presence, her neighbors said things like, “She used to be such a clean girl.” Or “Cleverness can’t bring luck. Everyone said she’d be a doctor or teacher, and look at her now. Pity. The girl needs her mother.”

Nilanthi had her own conversations in front of the women.  Her mother stood behind Nilanthi as she raised the well bucket to her laundry basin. As she smacked her husband’s clothes halfheartedly against a flattened rock, her mother reminded her, “Don’t be so timid. Really strike the rock with it.” Nilanthi closed her eyes as her mother’s voice continued to whisper. “Do you remember Lalith’s school uniform? No matter how gleaming it would be as he left for school, he’d return it smudged and stained. He’d always offer an excuse. A fierce cricket match. Running after a thief who had stolen a friend’s bike. Somehow he always became the hero of these stories. And a hero certainly needs his uniform shining the next day.”

Lay your life out flat before us. We never could spot you before, halfway round the earth and tied to land so small. But now we possess the science and vision. Now you can speak to us down the telephone cords of time and terrain.

Use scissors to slice off the right scenes; no need to reveal everything. Edit brutally. Soak the naked film in dye and roll it over the drum to dry it out. It is important that you get the tint exactly right. It is important that you show us exactly what you mean.

You have grown up and grown old in the shadow of the great technologies; here is another to tell your story. We will stop up all that leaking light, filter it through until it burns clean and true. We will bottle you and keep you. We will sell your warnings like wishes.

I am like everyone  else — good at some things, bad at others. I am good at eating clementines. I am bad at drawing straight lines. I am good at drinking coffee. I would be bad at building a house. If someone asked me to build them a house, I would have to say no. Or I would say yes and worry they would not like the house I built. Why is the kitchen made of coffee filters, they’d say? Why are there no floors? And I’d say, I wish you hadn’t asked me to build you a house.

You, Yunior, have a girlfriend named Alma, who has a long tender horse neck and a big Dominican ass that seems to exist in a fourth dimension beyond jeans. An ass that could drag the moon out of orbit. An ass she never liked until she met you. Ain’t a day that passes that you don’t want to press your face against that ass or bite the delicate sliding tendons of her neck. You love how she shivers when you bite, how she fights you with those arms that are so skinny they belong on an after- school special.

My husband wanted to see Civil War battlefields.

I said, not exactly my idea of a good time, but I only said it inside of my head, because to state such a thing out loud was only asking for a fight.

He said, you don’t have to go.

No, no, I said. I’ll see battlefields. If that’s what you want to do.

Sister Stop Breathing

What can you do if you want your sister to stop breathing?

Ice her up and drive north. Head to Santa Cruz. There you will find a main street called

Main Street. You can showcase her to people. Go to the Kinko’s parking lot and introduce her. Say, “I bet you didn’t know I had a sister! This is she. She’s made of ice.” The kids will want to touch her arm, and the sister will move in tiny waves. Once you have asserted that the sister exists and she is made of ice, breathe down her frozen face. The sister will begin to melt. The children will scream.

The first thing you to need realize is, nobody’s watching. I never said anything derogatory during the Super Bowl, a State of the Nation address, or a rerun of Friends. I’ve aired Saturdays, either 2 in the afternoon or 2 in the morning, not exactly prime time, and the folks watching TV then aren’t the kind of people you need to be image-conscious around. There are literally more of you here now than there are viewers, and that would be true if half of you left to go the bathroom. But enough with the excuses: This is an apology, so the exact number of people who heard you mercilessly mocked, week in and week out, for thirty years, is irrelevant. What’s important is that all of it is in good fun. People are laughing with you, not at you. Best of all, most of what I said isn’t true—not mostly. Besides: Who outside of Berwyn would even know what a Berwyn was if not for me? Imagine, all these years, that voice moaning, “Elk Grove Village” instead. Or “Shaumburg.” Or “Harvey.” “Minooka.” “Beecher.” Berwyn is on the map. Berwyn sings. Berwyn is where it’s at. How does any of this make me qualified to be your mayor? It doesn’t. But it reminds me of a story:

“Tell me a story,” the bearded man sitting on my living-room sofa commands. The situation, I must say, is anything but pleasant. I’m someone who writes stories, not someone who tells them. And even that isn’t something I do on demand. The last time anyone asked me to tell him a story, it was my son. That was a year ago. I told him something about a fairy and a ferret—I don’t even remember what exactly—and within two minutes he was fast asleep. But the situation is fundamentally different. Because my son doesn’t have a beard, or a pistol. Because my son asked for the story nicely, and this man is simply trying to rob me of it.

The funny thing about Kelly’s body was the way it appeared to weirdly bulge above the puss area whenever she wore clothes, but then was fine (flat, smooth) once she got naked. (This might more accurately be described as the funny thing about Kelly’s pants, seeing as it had to be the pants that caused the bulge. And yet the pants were normal, Levi’s five-oh-whatevers, so it wouldn’t be the way the pants were made that was funny, but the way the pants fit her body. Unless it was a funny way she wore the pants, i.e., maybe they would have fit just fine if she didn’t pull the waist so high or low, or—it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the way her overpuss area bulged or seemed to bulge when she was clothed, but then didn’t bulge or seem to when she was naked, was… funny.)

We were bound but not gagged; the wife wanted us to talk.  Her assistant had done the dirty work—jumped us in the street, knocked us out, transported us to wherever the hell we were, tied us tight to wooden chairs.  It was my day off.  I had been walking the Highline.  I heard footsteps behind me, turned, and everything went black.

They were lined up outside the door to the Actor’s Union, seated in chairs on either side of the hall. There was Dima and Tolya, Ilya and Luka, and that bore Vladimir Antonovich Pugachov, who would never cease to remind you that he had studied at the feet of Stanislavski himself. Boris Nikolayevich lifted his hat to say hello, but he received only a few nods of recognition in return. Everyone was going over their lines. The hallway buzzed with that earnest mumbling peculiar to Jews in prayer and actors before an audition.