The Flamethrowers

by Rachel Kushner

was like a movie set for a film about a drifter named Stretch who lives in a small gambling town on the Nevada border.

The room seemed to hold its breath, the motel curtain sucked against the glass by the draft of a partly opened window, a strip of sun wavering underneath the curtain’s hem, the light-blocking fabric holding back the outside world.

Winter came early. It was November and the water jeweled itself to a clear, frozen dribble from the fire hydrant in front of my building.

Like all people who fall in love, I took the attraction between me and Sandro as singular and specific, not explainable to types and preferences.

He conceded it was true, but said America was supposed to be a place ruined and homogenized by highways, that that was its unique character, crass and vulgar sameness.

He read about the country’s financial woes, some directly relating to Valera, the way my cousins and uncle read the statistics of a baseball team they weren’t rooting for, a team they hoped would lose, reveling in scandals and injuries and poor

He had pocked, sunken cheeks, thin bluish lips, and eyes like raisins, which made him seem angry and also a little dimwitted.

Chance, to me, had a kind of absolute logic to it. I revered it more than I did actual logic, the kind that was built from solid materials, from reason and from fact. Anything could be reasoned into being, or reasoned

An auburn beard tumbled down his chin like hillside erosion.

they looked like dancers on a dark stage, each holding its pose, waiting for the music to commence.

felt a sudden tenderness for him and the burden he bore, of being trapped in his own long-winded narcissism,

was the one shopping for experience.