All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

That tree, thirty-two years old, same as me, was just strong enough to stop the hover car from smashing right through the large window of my father’s study, where he was considering matters of lofty import and absentmindedly eating the grilled cheese sandwich that my mother had prepared for him as she made herself a mug of coffee to drink while sitting out in the sunshine to read a chapter of Great Expectations before it was time to do some other incredibly thoughtful routine thing that made my father’s life so pleasant and that he would realize she’d done for him for more than thirty years only once she was gone.

a kind, brittle woman who collapsed into herself for her husband.

Do something. Be something. Make something.” “How?” I said. “I’m not anything.

The brain is a soupy lightning storm swirling and crackling in three pounds of wet meat. Do conscious decisions even exist, or is everything an instinctual response gussied up with malformed logic?

bespoke novel enthusiast

I’ve luxuriated in what seemed at the time to be outrageously improbable possibilities for who I could be instead of who I am.