Bold Ventures: Thirteen Tales of Architectural Tragedy

by Charlotte Van den Broeck

“Do you think he killed her?” I ask. “They had only been married for a year,” Koen reflected – as if, generally speaking, it takes more than one year of marriage to find enough reasons to murder your wife.

Għawdex. The Maltese name of the island of Gozo sounds like an evolved Pokémon.

From a distance, the scene must look almost touching: a woman with a machine gun beside her like a faithful dog, the two of them gazing out over the water together.

Stories sometimes lead each other astray.

identifying women as a minority makes their work harmless, because whatever they do is seen in terms of their minority identity.

I recall other, similar moments when I thought I was experiencing what self-help books and greeting cards call happiness, but is in fact a kind of mercy: permission from yourself for everything to be all right in spite of everything, a state in which even the heaviness that came before was part of something larger, has meaning by negation, is a dark side indispensable to reaching lightness, a shadow already hanging over me again – since the lightness, as I’ve learned from experience, never lasts but segues into a new heaviness.

“Well, gosh, ma’am, there’s a population of twenty-three on paper, including the mayor, the chief of police, the fire chief and the tax assessor, but all twenty-three are basically golf players or club employees. Since the club’s closed right now, there’s no one here to talk to, no.” “In other words, Pine Valley doesn’t really exist? You made up a borough so you can do whatever you like inside this fence?” “Now you’re going too far, ma’am. I’ll have to ask you to step away from the fence.” “I bet every single one of you is a Republican.”