A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall

by Andy Abramowitz

“I do love good writing,” McGuinn mused, “or as better minds than mine have described it, ‘the bending of desirous eruptions against the wind, electric inspirations into the lightning.’” Both Wingers blinked.

But there was an accessible sweetness to him, a calm in his eyes and guileless charm in his smile. She just wanted to know him, to have him in her life.

He knew that if you slept with a woman who was not your wife, you earned the privilege of only sleeping with women who were not your wife. Such was the karmic spanking, almost poetic in its simplicity.

with sagging cheeks seated beside his frail wife, bony hand in bony hand. The sight of these people, who must have trudged together across the years, who’d aged to the point where they couldn’t age much more, awakened within Molly an alarming truth that somehow had never before hit her with such inevitability: one day she was going to come to a hospital like this one and her life would end. There would be something wrong with her heart or she’d have cancer of something important, and in one unceremonious moment, in a room so antiseptically bright and sterile that there’d be nowhere for her fear to burrow, she’d be carried out of this world for all of time. A stranger would then draw a sheet over her face and shuffle off to the break room for a snack, leaving the freshly dead Molly Erin Winger, born in Columbus, Ohio, unto Norman and Katherine Winger, alone among machines and boxes of rubber gloves that were no more alive or less dead than she. Then, a day or two later, some of the people with whom she’d shared the earth would put her in the ground. They’d watch her casket being lowered into the open soil and leave her there, all by herself, on a quiet hill among gravestones. Then those people would drive to someone’s house to nibble at turkey wraps and Caesar salad, lament the loss of a life, and ask if there was any barbecue sauce.

The bedtime ritual was one of the things he missed most about this house. (It wasn’t the same when Rachel slept over at the apartment.) The mere thought of the nightly routine going on without him could make Davis homesick beyond anything he’d ever felt—his daughter in her soft cotton pajamas, deliberating at her bookshelf, practicing cartwheels on the rug, commanding the performance of a medley of songs before lights out.

When Britt came home, she found Davis stretched out on the sofa, feasting on the feel of his own furniture and the scent of the candle that Britt kept lit on the kitchen counter. These candles were so quintessentially Britt. The woman could easily kill a half hour in Bath & Body Works, prying the lids off the candles and sniffing the colored wax. But Davis knew that what really sold her was not the aromas, but the seasonally emblematic names, that she was seduced by the romantic thought of her house smelling like lilac blossom in spring, cottage breeze in summer, apple cupcake in autumn, and maple gingerbread in winter.

“I’m saying that you have a Buck Rogers lunchbox. And you work from home, so you really don’t even need a lunchbox.” “It’s Battlestar Galactica, and sometimes when the weather’s nice I eat down by the water.”

Dear Lifeguard, Thank you for saving me. Charlie

“I’ve never felt like a deserted daughter, because I always had you.”

‘Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.’”