The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

Five minutes, I told myself. Five minutes. If I stayed longer, the place the map depicted might encroach.

the question of whether he belonged in a given situation (the question itself was evidence of not belonging).

I trusted the need for risk, the importance of honoring it.

There is no fixed reality, only objects in contrast. Even the Earth is moving.

It was always the son of power, the daughter of power, who was most eager to abuse it.

What occurred did so because I was open to it, and not because fate and I met at a certain angle.

more drinks were ordered, and a sense of possession over time faded away, a sense of the evening as mine loosened,

I had not kissed him but knew I would, and he knew that I knew, and there was a kind of mutual joy in this slide into inevitability,

the sea was not for us or against us. ‘It doesn’t know we’re here,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t know.’