Our safety, we were told, was the primary concern and we were told to be careful going up and down the stairs and that we should regard ourselves as if we personally lived here. Everything is aristocratic and stylish and I could barely recall our hasty morning departure from Little Neck from bitterness, political stresses, and from our immoral conduct. That was all blurred and misshapen.
A woman’s friend buys toilet paper in bulk. Dozens of rolls line a section of wall in the basement, stacked hip-high and four deep, a snowbank against the stone wall of the foundation. The supply’s position, and its volume, makes it the first thing the woman sees as she descends the stairs, sent by her friend to retrieve a jar of jam and a bag of coffee beans. Her reaction to it arrives with an intensity that surprises her.
No. He argued that this was altogether different, and maybe he was right. Grace hated musicals herself. She’d had to sit through My Fair Lady one year because Josh was operating the sound board. It had made her feel restless and a little violent.
He introduced himself in an English spoken just strangely enough to lend the language the empathy it often lacks. He was striking, his close-cut sideburns giving way to tight curlicues that charmingly splayed over his forehead. It wasn’t until he refused the cot in Imam Salim’s room and slept on the mosque’s floor that we began to double-check our hasty assumption of his imposture. When he showered in the filthy ablution chamber, we figured he was, in all likelihood, a genuine paragon.
What I’m saying is that when you grow up here it’s harder to take the shit you see on social media seriously. Like, for real, who the fuck cares about your big sushi date night in Dallas or whatever? What’s crazy too is that everybody knows they’re creating a false image of themselves, so everybody has to know that everyone else is doing that too.