The Chosen and the Beautiful

by Nghi Vo

Of course, the young lieutenant from Camp Taylor still had his soul, and by 1922, Jay Gatsby of West Egg had no such thing.

a single nail painted slick black, the mark of someone with infernal dealings.

So Gatsby was a fabulously wealthy man with a harmless affectation, or perhaps he actually was the one in a million who had sold his soul.

It was no Mercury dime New York moon, but a harvest moon brought all the way from the wheat fields of North Dakota to shine with sweet benevolence down on the chosen and the beautiful.

Seeing him then, you knew he would remake the world for the object of his desire, but what a world it would be, and it wasn’t as if you could stop him. I knew Gatsby right then for

what he was: a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.

In these matters, girls were almost always on their own.

You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.