The Orchard

by David Hopen

Is tragedy dead?” This is what I asked Mrs. Hartman at the end of it all, when I was still obsessed with every fatal flaw but my own.

For the first time in my life, I wondered whether happiness might somehow be beside the point.

I found it simultaneously beautiful and devastating to consider that the other human beings around us had no knowledge whatsoever of our two lives.

I thought about how surviving requires finding something that possesses the mind so thoroughly that nothing else matters.