I am normal, I think, in all regards except for the fact that I still live with my parents. I read somewhere or heard somewhere not long ago that more and more adults these days live with their parents. It is comforting to know that I, that my girlfriend and I, are not in a league of our own, so to speak.
“Today is the fourteenth of February. My favourite day of the year. Christmas is a good one too, and New Year’s Eve is usually reliable, but there’s nothing quite so powerful as loneliness magnified by a day of cards, flowers, and displays of affection, all partaken in by other people.” New fiction by Anton Rose.
“No matter how torturous it was in Panama, those six weeks pale in comparison to Survival School. They do things to you there to prove just how machine-like you really are. They starve you of sleep for seventy-two hours, as you chant enthusiastically: I am an American Airman, my mission is to fly, fight, and win.” New fiction by Elliott Scott.
Steve Regal pressed his palm to the copy machine glass. The heat and smell of toner comforted him. The day before, at the dentist, he’d read in a two-year-old National Geographic a feature on bullfighting in Seville. He’d been waiting for that article for thirty-two years, though he hadn’t known he’d been waiting until he’d…