A Beginner's Guide to Free Fall

by Andy Abramowitz

Richard had been puking. He puked before he fired people. It was like his pregame ritual.

“The best and the worst things in life are sudden, Ms. Winger. Everything else takes too damn long,” Richard said.

she spied a distant airplane at cruising altitude and envied the lucky souls aboard it, each of them bound for somewhere far, far away.

And once again, Molly marveled at the vast, limitless ways in which the extroverts failed to grasp the introverts, how the fighters would never understand the fleers.

We’re all terribly unsure of ourselves, each one of us tunneling toward something strange. But you—you are nobody’s shadow. And even if you were, a shadow does not belong to the thing that casts it.

“The last time you attempted to bake anything, you gashed your finger opening the mix, used salt instead of sugar, and then forgot to turn the oven on.”

So much of life was holding on to the people and the things that rooted you in the world, so that you didn’t have to wake up each day and start anew.

The problem with omens, though, is that you can’t tell the good ones from the bad until the dust settles.

“I’m in Turkey,” he kept reminding himself, as he often did when traveling abroad. It was important to drink up the differentness of where he was, to celebrate the fact that he was somewhere he’d never been before and might never be again.

“Clichés get a bad rap,” she told him. “There are worse things than being a cliché.”