The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells

by Andrew Sean Greer

There is the thing you hope for and then, beyond it, like a prize kept locked and out of reach behind the counter, there is the thing you dare not hope for.

In all my travels, in my anxieties, I had thought only about the troubles of my life.

the whole horrible beautiful magic act of my life.

That someone else’s life depended on me.

There is always another coming, as there was even now, buried in the dirt by my foot, the seed of the oak that would crack the sidewalk in

Images of the space shuttle seemed like science fiction to me now.

that without my neglect, our unmarried arrangement, he would be a better man.

It was the goddamn way of things.

What damage I had done, in that other world, I did not yet know.

The mind, however, is just a figurehead above that hidden dictator: the heart. It did nothing to help the anger. Or the

“It’s so unlikely to be alive, isn’t it? The right temperature, and gravity, the right atoms combining at the precise right moment, you’d think it would never happen.”

“Life, it’s so unlikely,” she said, then turned to me again. “It’s so much better than we think it is, isn’t it?”

our fate is made, so often, merely by the place where we are standing.

WHY IS IT impossible to be a woman? Men will never understand, men who are always themselves, day after day, shouting opinions and drinking freely and flirting and whoring and weeping and being forgiven for it all.

Do not dilute yourself in petty days. Greta: Mark your hour on earth. Felix, I remember what you