Beginnings

Below the mesa lie the ruins of the potters’ school.

The painting, or the tooth she needed to have pulled?

They drove up Canyon Road through blinding snow to buy piñon kindling from Jesus.  Or from his son, José, Rose said, clearing the windshield with her oversized mitten; she thought she’d heard that Jesus moved to Albuquerque.

Late in the afternoon the fishing boat drops them on the island of the lepers.

She had become fascinated with the idea of young galaxies.

At the top of all the ladders, on a reddish sandstone ledge outside the cave, a weathered man older than Mandy’s father sat crosslegged like an Indian fakir, playing Norwegian Wood on a flute.

She followed Jess and Alex back to the station from the old stone winery, laughing delightedly at the tipsy meandering of the rented bikes along the rutted road as they tried to avoid the holes and fallen apricots.

One January Saturday they found a small abandoned cottage in the Santa Cruz Mountains, and just two weeks later she left him.

The heirloom roses moved with her from Massachusetts to Hawai’i.

The archaeologists had been gone from that mountaintop for ninety-four years, and the elements had again covered over everything they’d uncovered.

She’s stunned that her new MacBook beats her resoundingly at chess.

Tobie’s divine revelation came during the sing-along Messiah.

For Mandy the giant pinecone was the absolute last straw.

The transvestite has a big hole in her fishnet stocking.

The bus to The Cloisters passes slowly through Harlem.

The fire hoses erupt like geysers into the Chicago River.

She’d become obsessed with Ursula and the ten thousand virgins of Cologne.

—Christie