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There is a city called Salemo. Salemo sits atop a cliffside at the edge of a sea. The water of that sea is always clearest blue, except when it is clearest green, or clearest purple. The colors change with the tides, but the waves are always safe to swim in, with schools of luminescent fish dashing between the coral reefs. In Salemo, you can spend your days lying on its pristine beaches.
Jo drives urgently as they race toward the star, not sure how far to go, racing because the baby is coming tonight, now, and He (a He, of course) is supposed to be born under the star, that’s how the story goes. The story, the new story and the old, begins with a visitor, a messenger. Molly had just logged out for the day when the monk knocked on her door.
So, this is awkward. We aren’t at the stage in our relationship where I’d feel comfortable revising your life-poem on the fly. Even as a backup plan . . . yet here we are. I’m sorry. I know I should have said that to you before the anesthesiologist put you under and the surgeon opened up your skull. But now the surgeon is staring at the quivering quill in my hand.
Jeanne Calment said she was 122, but there were questions. The records from 1875 were shaky, some of them deliberately burned. Tanaka Kane, 119, was on firmer ground, and then there were loads of others in the hundred-teens. For some time 120 seemed to be a firm limit.
True love’s kiss works miracles. Everyone knows the story: The sculptor who carved a perfect woman, his own creation, and when he fell in love with her (and how could he have failed to fall in love with her, his own creation?) and kissed her.
You don’t know why you ask because you already know he can’t answer. A body is only a body when it has all its parts. And he—that beloved man you once hiked through Angkor Wat’s abandoned halls and root-choked courtyards with, who once pulled you from the dizzying edge of the Queens-Manhattan skywalk—is now just an unsightly array of incomplete parts.
I was born normal enough, except that I was four days late, which isn’t so much, and slightly jaundiced, which isn’t unusual, and had a raccoon for an arm, which is admittedly strange. It wasn’t my whole arm—I was human to the elbow. And it wasn’t a whole raccoon.
You’ve been driving for hours and I wish you would stop. You clutch the steering wheel so hard, your knuckles pop white, your palms slick with sweat and desperation. Sunken, glassy, your eyes flick between the fuel gauge, the endless road, and the trembling land through which we pass.
Josea Dream was the pearl captain at the heart of the bivalve ship Blue Spring, which had swum the black for a thousand years. It was a mystery to Josea—it was a mystery to anyone who’d ever thought about it—why the bivalves suffered their captains’ proddings.
Recent scholarship has shed considerable light on many previously puzzling or mysterious aspects of the life of the Baba Yaga—or, as some would still have it, the Baba Yagas. But one element has remained largely unstudied, and indeed, almost completely ignored.
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