An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

by Elizabeth McCracken

This is why you need everyone you know after a disaster, because there is not one right response. It’s what paralyzes people around the grief-stricken, of course, the idea that there are right things to say and wrong things and it’s better to say nothing than something clumsy.

grief lasts longer than sympathy, which is one of the tragedies of the grieving,

one of the one in two hundred pregnancies that miscarried after the procedure,

I JUST ALMOST HAD ANANEURYSM

The city was all blue skies and light breezes and raw nerves and melancholy.

Claudelle took the printout from the test and tried to fax it to Sylvie’s office in Bordeaux, but Sylvie’s fax machine wasn’t working.

These folks seem infuriatingly chill