story: How Can I help? 

author: Rivka Galchen

year: 2016

where: kitchen table in front of half-finished buildings and an artificial billabong

note: In an unrelated New York Times article, the journalist writes on Galchen, “A while back, the writer Rivka Galchen, visiting a writing seminar of mine, was asked by a student why she made the main character of her novel ‘Atmospheric Disturbances’ a man. She replied that if her emotionally remote and highly cerebral narrator were a woman, that narrator would be called unlikable at best, unbelievable at worst. ”

a line: “Maybe if I could actually be nice to my sister, in my heart, I wouldn’t have to be so nice to her in the pastures and parking lots of our real world.”