Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
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From the Archives
Features • Commencement 2010
By the time Romain Gary shot himself in the head, the French-Russian writer had published over fifty novels under four different names, directed two movies, fought in the air force, and represented France as a consul. His marriages—first to the British writer Lesley Branch, then to the American actress Jean Seberg—had brought him celebrity. He had enmeshed some of France’s literary giants in an elaborate hoax that broke fundamental precepts of the country’s cultural institutions.
But Gary always saw his own life as a series of incomplete drafts. Even as he planned his own death, he remained on the path to self-improvement. “To renew myself, to relive, to be someone else, was always the great temptation of my existence,” read the essay he left with his suicide note. It’s perhaps no surprise that biographies of the author often seem overwhelmed by the slippery nature of their subject. “Romain Gary: The Chameleon,” “Romain Gary: The Man who Sold his Shadow.” Gary was one of France’s most successful writers, but he lived the life of a spy.
Roman Kacew was born in 1914, perhaps in Moscow but just as likely in Kursk, a small city near modern-day Turkey. His mother was poor and Jewish, an outcast in the Russian Empire. He never knew his father; the name Kacew came from a second marriage. From a young age, the boy began inventing stories about his heritage. He decided before the age of ten that he came from greatness: his father was really the Russian actor Ivan Mosjoukine, with whom he shared a fierce stare.
Kurksk didn’t last long. Next came Vilnius, then Warsaw, then Nice in southern France. Moving was tough for Kacew, who was scrawny and had to learn new languages fast. It was worse for his mother, a former actress who worked as a maid to support her son. She was driven to prove her son’s greatness. In each new town, she pushed the young boy to find his passion—dance, music, theater—always leaving open the possibility that he might write.
Looking back on his childhood in his semi-autobiographical novel Promise at Dawn, the writer would later paint this search for a passion as a search for a public identity. The question of a pseudonym runs through the novel. Even as his mother exhorts her son to impress his French peers, she asks that he tailor his work to their expectations. “‘We have to find you a pseudonym,’ [my mother] said sternly. ‘A great French writer cannot have a Russian name. If you were a virtuoso violinist, it would be great, but, for a titan of French literature, it just won’t do.’”
The name Romain Gary came to him while he was defending the country in the air force. Romain was just the French version of what he already had; Gary was a new flavor. In Russian, it means “burn,” and it’s a command in the imperative. He knew it best from gypsy love songs. “Gari, gari… burn, burn my love.” His colleagues began to call him Romain, then just Gary, which they often took for his first name. Gary Cooper was a popular figure in wartime France.
After the war, Gary became French secretary to the United Nations, then General Consul in Los Angeles. He was well-polished and a good public speaker. Pictures from the period show him hand-feeding elephants or looking thoughtfully through a mansion window. One has him signing books, dressed in a navy military uniform.
It was in Los Angeles that he met Seberg. She had just finished filming Breathless under the direction of Jean Godard. He had just turned forty-five and was getting bored with his marriage to Lesley Branch. At his wife’s suggestion, he began to date the actress as a means of distraction. But Seberg soon became pregnant, and Gary left one woman for the other. They were a public item—the pair dined with the Kennedys and with General Charles de Gaulle. She entertained as the beautiful actress, while he, acting the part of the expatriate intellectual, always showcased his refinement.
A reporter eating dinner with the couple described Gary as the Pygmalion to Miss Seberg’s Galatea. “‘You should see what I gave her to read,’ Gary began. “‘Pushkin, Dostoevski, Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert...’” “‘Madame Bovary!’” Jean sang out. “‘That could have been me if I had stayed in Marshalltown one day longer.’” Gary may have seemed a little eccentric. But still he was a talented diplomat: he could make any young American see her life reflected in the French canon.
Gary was slowly infiltrating this canon. His novels, published under the official name, met with instant success. A European Education was acclaimed by its 1945 audience; Jean-Paul Sartre speculated that it might be the first great novel about the Second World War. By 1956, Gary had achieved France’s highest literary honor. His novel, The Roots of Heaven, won the Prix Goncourt, an award given annually to the best novel written in French.
As Gary rose in fame, his marriage began to wear. A rumor surfaced that Seberg had slept with a member of the Black Panther group and was now carrying his child. The actress became depressed; she was found on a tropical beach half-dead after an attempted suicide. By the time Seberg gave birth to Gary’s child, the two had already agreed to separate. A few months earlier, Gary had discovered Seberg was having an affair with Clint Eastwood and asked for a divorce. It’s said that he first challenged the actor to a duel.
Emile Ajar was a ruse. Romain Gary had been “classified, catalogued, taken for granted” by the critics, which, to the author, precluded them from taking his work seriously. Emile Ajar, however, was relevant and fresh. He was a Franco-Algerian medical student living in Brazil in order to avoid charges of terrorism. And Ajar’s first novel seemed to offer the novelty it promised. Loosely translated as Cuddles in English, Gros-Calin tells the story of a statistician who falls in love with his pet python. It is a touching, humorous book, and only a few critics discerned that certain lines echoed Gary novels.
Ajar’s next was even better, said the critics. Madame Rosa (Life Before Us) seemed to seamlessly bring together all of France’s post-war worries. The earnest account of an Arab boy living with his Jewish foster mother, an obese Holocaust survivor, touched on guilt, immigration, and French identity. To the discerning reader, The Life Before Us might have seemed a rewrite of Gary’s Promise at Dawn, with the attention now shifted to another boy-mother pair. To France’s literary elite, it was worthy of its own Goncourt. Ajar’s own ambiguous identity made the prize all the more important. The name was neither definitely Jewish nor definitely Arab, which, to critics, tinged the political narrative with an uncertainty. By uncovering the author’s true identity, France might earn insight into the book’s meaning.
Emile Ajar was carefully planned. Gary would send manuscripts to his son Diego, who, like the supposed Emile Ajar, was living in Brazil. Diego would then send them to the publishers in Paris. Only Seberg, Diego, and a couple of close friends could claim to know Ajar. But the Goncourt prize made the scheme difficult to hold up. The recipient of France’s highest literary honor can’t just hide out across the Atlantic—the secret had to be divulged. Before the ceremony, a revelation was released to the press: Paul Pawlovitch, Romain Gary’s distant cousin, had written the books. As a decoy for the writer, Pawlovitch accepted the prize and moved into Gary’s apartment building, where he and Gary continued forging papers and preparing speeches for Emile Ajar.
They were successful—even when Gary revealed himself to be Ajar in his suicide note, several critics refused to believe it. After all, they had made a place for Ajar in their own pantheon. “Ajar marks the revolt against the literature of our daddies; Ajar is the anti-cliché combatant,” wrote one critic. In France, The Life Before Us is the highest selling novel of the twentieth century.
When the ten members of the Academy Goncourt come together to discuss books, they’re self-consciously making history. On the second Monday of each month, some of France’s foremost writers and critics meet in a private room on the second floor of an elegant restaurant. There, they talk about the state of French writing and survey the country’s talent. The search for the best novel of the year pauses in August, when the group splits for vacation. Academy rules are strict—one book a year, and the award can be given to any author only one time. It’s been that way since 1902, when Jules and Edmond Goncourt founded a prize to celebrate French prose.
The room has hardly changed. I ate there once, on my grandmother’s eightieth birthday. The “Salon Goncourt” is shaped like an egg and lined with pictures of momentous gatherings. When you close the large wooden doors, you can’t hear a noise above the clinking of silverware on porcelain plates.
This was the institution against which Gary was writing. It was insular and back-scratching and he hated it. “Outside Paris there is no trace of that pathetic little will to power,” he wrote. So as he conformed to French standards, he was also chipping away at them. He had integrated himself into the country’s cultural monolith only to gnaw at it.
Romain Gary spent much of his existence inventing secrets, but at the end of his life he was very clear. As he prepared to kill himself in 1980, he wrote in an essay:
“And the gossip that came back to me from fashionable dinners where people pitied poor Romain Gary, who must be a little sad, a little jealous of the meteoric rise in the literary firmament of his cousin Emile Ajar…
I’ve had a lot of fun. Good-bye, and thank you.”
Fiction • Summer 2021
Because the knock didn’t sound like Sam’s or a neighbor’s or even a Jehovah’s witness. Besides, on the 21st floor we didn’t get many stray knockers to begin with. I ignored it at first but they started knocking so loud I thought they might break down the door so I threw the rest of my shit in a duffel and kissed grandmama bye ‘cause I knew the cops wouldn’t hurt her.
Features • Winter 2020 - Feast
Chang-rae Lee is the Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of five novels: Native Speaker (1995); A Gesture Life (1999); Aloft (2004); The Surrendered; and On Such a Full Sea (2014). Born in South Korea, Lee moved with his family to the United States at the age of three. He previously taught at Princeton University, where he was a creative writing professor and the director of Princeton’s Program in Creative Writing. Since 2016, he has been the Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor in the English Department and Creative Writing Program at Stanford University. This winter, fiction editor Angela F. Hui was able to speak with Lee over the phone. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Features • Winter 2014 - Trial
I
After my Grandfather died, he waited in line for one year. His ashes, inside a lacquered box, sat among the ashes of others in a cold concrete bunker nestled in the Chinese countryside. Each box bore a tiny black-and-white engraving of the deceased. The owner of the bunker kept track of burials by scrawling a name and date on the lids.
A single light bulb hung from the ceiling. It was rigged to save electricity by shutting off when it sensed no movement. Whenever someone came in on funeral business, the bulb flickered on. Otherwise, the dead waited their turn in darkness.
PROPERTY RIGHTS
There are seven million people living in Hong Kong, making it the fourth most densely populated city in the world. Its citizens are dying faster than ever, at numbers that have doubled since 1970. Forty thousand people now die each year from the standard gamut of reasons: drowning, old age, suicide, electrocution, severe allergies, traffic accidents, heartache, stress.
A century ago, these 40,000 souls would have found eternal peace at the foot of some sacred, pine-forested mountain chosen for optimal feng shui. Such postmortem peace is now impossible, as most of this once-sacred land has been developed into condominiums or factories.
The line between the yang world of the living and the yin world of spirits is vaguely drawn in Chinese theology (an amalgam of Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian beliefs). This line blurs more each year as millions of Chinese flock to live over the old bones of their ancestors, creating a literal juxtaposition of life and death.
Property rights, for example, work for the dead in much the same way as for the living. In China, property exists in a state of perpetual leasehold. Whether a high rise or a hovel, residential property may be owned only for a period of 70 years. At the end of this period, the property is either re-leased or the hapless owners evicted.
The dead, too, face the possibility of eviction. China’s most esteemed burying ground, Babaoshan (“??? Eight Treasure Mountain”) cemetery in Beijing, is not so much a holy mountain as a quiet gap in urban sprawl. Regardless, the upper echelon of Chinese society engages in bidding wars over its plots, which start at 70,000 yuan, or about 11,500 dollars for a 20-year lease. If a family’s fortune has turned by the end of those years, the formerly exalted government official or wealthy businessman is expelled from his resting place like a loaf of expired bread.
II
Once Grandfather’s year in exile ended, our entire extended family packed into four Toyota cars and prepared to inter him in his (semi-)permanent resting place.
It was raining that day. For a long while we drove into pine-covered hills, until an empty city emerged from between the trees. Tall black columns rose from stone steps which went up and up until they brushed the grey horizon. Blurry, colorless portraits stared at our small party from every direction.
Cousin Jiang held up an umbrella to keep Grandfather dry. We climbed stone steps until we reached a small slab nestled between two columns. On it was Grandfather’s face, etched in ink. Elder Uncle Hu raised the slab with a tire jack, revealing an opening underneath.
“Well—here it is,” Uncle said, hesitation in his voice.
SAFETY NETS
Since Neolithic times, the Chinese have been obsessed with remembrance after death. To be forgotten by descendants is equivalent to hell. One’s ghost would enter the next world as a low-ranking personage, looked down upon by other spirits. To guard against this fate, the ancient Chinese buried their dead with plentiful provisions, including a large supply of the deceased’s favorite food and alcohol. In certain eras in ancient China, wealthy individuals would be buried with mementos, servants, or even wives.
Today, wine is still poured into the grave-earth. Oranges, meat buns, and other delicacies are left on graves to fill the air with pungent smells of decomposition. Wax fruit, plastic jade bracelets, and paper Rolex watches are common offerings. A cigarette might be lit and left burning on the grave. Lung cancer is one of China’s leading causes of death.
Despite strict rules governing food and alcohol provisions, religious requirements have long been lax. A wealthy family might have employed both a Taoist and a Buddhist priest to officiate the funeral, or invited an expert in the Confucian classics to preach filial piety as the dead were ushered away.
Unlike their modern counterparts, the ancients enjoyed a short waiting period between death and spiritual peace. According to tradition, spirits remain on earth for seven days, after which they enter heaven, or hell, or are reincarnated. These seven days are fraught with danger for the family of the deceased. Traditions, some common, others unique to individual families, must be meticulously obeyed. Any small misstep—the presence of a mirror, the color red, the misuse of a title—might cause the spirit to transform into a vindictive ghost.
III
“Turn around,” commanded Aunt Pearl.
“What?”
“Turn around. You can’t watch,” she repeated as she gripped my shoulders and steered me to another gravestone (marked “?? Zhang Xin”) a few feet away.
“Why can’t I watch?” I protested, plucking at her lean fingers. “He’s my grandfather.”
“Of course. And he was born in the year of the pig,” she said. For Aunt Pearl, no more explanation was needed. According to Chinese superstition, dogs and pigs have “?? mao dun,” instinctual conflict, and if I were to witness the interment, he would come back as a ghost and bring me bad luck.
I glanced at my father, who stood near grandfather’s grave. He shook his head as if to say, Let it be.
Sighing, I obeyed Aunt Pearl’s demand and spun around. She clicked her tongue with satisfaction and returned to tearing apart sheets of fake dollar bills. Each bill bore in clumsy English letters the logo “Hell Bank Notes” and the confident claim “guaranteed legal tender for spirits.” Later we would burn them on Grandfather’s grave to send him pocket money for trinkets and snacks in the other world.
Uncle Hu grunted as he cleared debris from the grave. I scanned the other gravestones, which bore black-and-white portraits of mostly expressionless faces. I could tell the age of each person when he or she died. Most faces were old and lined. Every so often a young face peered out from the frame, with eyes black and cold.
Aunt Pearl finished tearing the Hell Bank Notes. The pine trees rustled impatiently. Sounds slowed and faded, while the grey faces around me grew accusing and hostile. I felt a great desire to turn from them, to turn around, to look, to make sure my family was still behind me, to make sure they had not vanished into the other world and left me alone.
A loud crack broke the quiet. I spun around in time to see the edge of a red lacquered box vanish under the stone slab, into darkness.
We kowtowed in succession, three knocks each. When my turn came I could think only about the wet dark hole in which we had buried Grandfather. I kneeled dumbly on the cold pine-strewn ground until Aunt Pearl tugged at my arm.
We set off firecrackers to frighten away evil spirits. They fizzled into the air and burst dully against the rain. Bangs echoed intrusively from column to column and suffocated among the pines.
We squeezed into our four Toyotas before the echoes died. Uncle Hu drove the first car, his fingers pale against the steering wheel. We sped away and away from that empty stone city, none of us turning to look back.
HISTORIES
Cremation was not always the norm in China. Although Buddhists regularly burned the bodies of their dead, other religious and ethnic groups considered cremation taboo. Tibetans, for example, believed only criminals should be burned. An auspicious Tibetan burial, known as Sky Burial, involved placing the body on a high mountain peak to be picked apart by vultures and the natural elements.
In modern China, however, cremation has been law since 1956 when 151 communist party officials, including Chairman Mao Zedong, signed a Funeral Reformation proposal. Given the nearly half-billion Chinese deaths that occurred from the 1940s to 1960s, there was a simple logic to incineration.
According to the China Funeral Association, modern China has a death count of over eight million people each year. Four million of these bodies are cremated, which brings the cremation rate to 52.7 percent. The Association would prefer 100 percent.
At the Yishan Crematory, the workers are mostly middle-aged and balding. Ashes work their way under their fingernails, leaving the hands of handlers permanently black. The pollution that hangs as perpetual smog over China’s cities does not hold a candle to Yishan, a factory for processing the dead.
Yishan is in Shanghai, a city of 14 million with a death rate of 100,000 people per year. Most of those 100,000 pass through the crematorium. Four hundred bodies a day are ferried by motorized lift to 24 incinerators. The incinerators belch toxic smoke into the air and into nearby neighborhoods, perpetuating some cosmic joke about the cycle of death.
It is a most innovative facility. In previous years, blood drained from bodies was disposed through the sewer system. But the sheer volume of displaced blood eventually grew to become a health hazard. Yishan developed an embalming method that uses freezing instead of bloodletting to preserve bodies until they are ready for cremation.
Many Yishan workers are kept busy digging graves or carving gravestones, but they never seem to keep up with demand. Some would-be customers resort to do-it-yourself mounds on the sides of railway tracks or on the hillsides of scenic preserves.
Wealthy families have the option of circumventing the Yishan process altogether. Some send bodies abroad to be buried in the United States or Canada, taking advantage of various body shipping services that promise to deliver goods intact and in acceptable condition.
With so many bodies going through the crematorium, mistakes do happen. Instead of servants or wives, some families burn a fire-resistant memento with the body. The object serves the dual purpose of comforting the soul of the dead and verifying the ashes’ former identity.
According to the workers at Yishan, the funeral business is a business of life. They do whatever they can to smooth the post-death process for their customers.
IV
In China, four (“? si”) is considered an unlucky number because it is phonetically similar to the word for “die.” The combination of four and eight (“?? si ba”) is even unluckier because it sounds like a curse - “?? die now.” Buildings often skip over the fourth floor and jump directly from three to five.
Even in cemeteries, where the dead already reign, one rarely sees a fourth burial terrace or a tombstone numbered four.
FINAL DECISIONS
The combination of Taoist, Buddhist, and Confucian thought in China complicates end-of-life decisions.
Taoism urges harmony with the Tao (“? the Way”). Death is a part of life, the flow of the universe. In dying, one returns to the primordial void.
Buddhism urges freedom from suffering. To accept death is to accept the futility of suffering and to ease the suffering of caretakers. Life is transient and impermanent, and a single death has no effect on the scheme of the cosmos. Besides, there is always the chance one may be reborn as a being higher than human.
Confucianism urges communal harmony, especially within a family. Followers of Confucian thought think constantly of their ancestors, their children, and their relations, however distantly related. If one person’s sickness creates discord and suffering for the family, it might be better to end the problem at the source. And if one’s relations make proper preparations, death and the journey that follows will pass like a dream.
Despite the diversity of Chinese beliefs, the overarching message they impress on the Chinese psyche seems to be: Let go.
V
“I can’t go,” declared Grandmother.
“Mother,” said Aunt Pearl with impatience, “Not this again.”
“I won’t go,” Grandmother repeated.
“You must go,” said Aunt Pearl, “We buried the old father last May, and now we must go pay our respects. It’s the one-year burial anniversary. You’re his wife.”
“I don’t care. I’m not going to that damned place.”
“Dear mother, for heaven’s sakes, why not?”
“Because you saw how he died,” hissed Grandmother, “Feeble, in his bed, with his bedpans. Such indignity. Smoking a cigarette until his last moments. Selfish. He was the type of man who kept his best thoughts for himself. When Hu was sent off to labor in the boonies, did he raise a finger? No! I was the one who walked miles for my son—your husband. But when Little Sister went to Beijing for college, who took a vacation in the big city to visit every year? Him, of course. The old fogey was selfish and self-absorbed. I was the one who kept this family together. How dare he leave me so suddenly, in that way, with such—such indignity. I will not go visit him. He should be the one to come visit me. He should be the one—he should be the one—”
“Don’t say that,” exclaimed Aunt Pearl, aghast, “How would you feel if he really came back to haunt you? You’d have a heart attack, and we’d be burying you next!”
“Oh, I would have some choice words for him,” said Grandmother.
“Oh—dear!” Aunt Pearl quickly made a bow to Grandfather’s home shrine in the corner of the kitchen. The grey face in his portrait remained impassive. Uncle Hu, standing silent by the door, looked at his watch.
With an air of finality, Grandmother sat down on a kitchen chair and repeated, “I’m not budging. I’m too old. I waited so many years, in bad weather, for him. He can stand to wait a few more years for me.”
Aunt Pearl wavered between Grandmother and Uncle Hu like an indecisive bee. Finally she exclaimed, “Ai-ya! Have it your way, then. Don’t blame me if he comes back and haunts you for being a faithless wife,” and then, with genuine anxiety, “Mother, if you still insist on your blasphemy, make sure you hang a frond of palm and a clove of garlic over the door. You can buy palm fronds for cheap at the fourth street market. Oh, and the garlic must be extra pungent. That is the only way to ward away ghosts.”
Aunt Pearl shepherded the entire family out the door. On the street waited four gleaming Toyotas, the same ones we used last year. As I climbed into a back seat, I looked back over my shoulder into Grandmother’s kitchen window.
Grandmother stood in the middle of the room for a moment, arms folded, watching us go. Then, as the door of the last Toyota clicked shut, her entire body relaxed. Perhaps it was a trick of the tinted windows, but the lines of grief she had accumulated in the past few months seemed to melt from her face. Her lips formed a slow, secret smile.
She sat down cross-legged, in the fashion of a small girl, in front of Grandfather’s shrine. With tenderness, she picked up his black-and-white portrait and placed upon it a single kiss.
Fiction • Commencement 2014
There was something about Peter’s clothes that attracted the moths. It was his scent, he thought. It had changed: there was some new chemical he released into the air. His most recent bedmates had com-mented on the aroma of his skin.
“Like Sweet Tarts,” one had said.
“Like dill,” said another.
He noted that certain of his clothes -- his cashmere cardigan, originally his father’s, and his red cotton shirt -- were especially popular among the insects. His shirt had been wearable until holes began to proliferate around the nipple area; Peter quartered the shirt and added the pieces to his pile of cleaning rags under the kitchen sink. Others evinced signs of life: a collar, burrowed-through, an opening in the armpit, a bundle of loosening threads. Peter did not mind much. He liked the way the moth-holes made him look worn, old, professorial. (He was only, in fact, a young lecturer in English.) At night, as he read by lamplight, pen in hand and cold stout on a coaster next to him, he would be pleasantly distracted by a moth beating about his head, wedging itself in the gutter of his book, landing on his shoulder to lay, he presumed without feeling the need to discover, many eggs. Looking down the bridge of his nose through his wire-rimmed glasses, Peter would continue to read, stopping once or twice to shoo the moth away from his pages.
He lived with the Colonel, a grey and black tabby he had adopted from his last lover. Gerard was from Arles, where the Colonel had fed on live mice, fish bones, and goat’s milk. He had stalked birds in the street and meandered among Roman ruins, which bore graffiti by teenagers tired of their city’s age value. In Peter’s small apartment crammed with books, the Colonel paced back and forth in the living room, bored and angry. He expressed his frustration by refusing to use the litter box to defecate, unburdening himself, instead, on the sheets of paper strewn across the floor near Peter’s writing desk. In the mornings, the Colonel would leap onto the kitchen counter and snatch the bread that popped out of the toaster. Peter usually left the toast to the cat, but had taken to guarding his breakfast cereal with a butter knife as he ate and read the paper.
The moths were the Colonel’s only entertainment and solace. He began to sit in front of the television whenever Peter turned it on; he knew the insects were attracted to the light. When the moths neared the bright screen, he would jump and deftly pluck them out of the air, his fur standing on end from the television’s static. He also spent more time around Peter, who could be trusted to have at least two moths circling his body at any moment. Peter, however, misinterpreted the Colonel’s proximity as an indication of their budding friendship.
For the most part, they lived together peaceably -- Peter, the Colonel, and the moths. Man and cat both missed Gerard, who had left suddenly after having lived with Peter in his apartment for almost a year. He had left with very little: one suitcase which, inconveniently, did not roll, for that was the retrograde style of the day; and his straw hat, which was recognizable by its broad brim and thin black ribbon. Everything had been packed before breakfast, before Peter woke.
2026