Our brightest days are a rich subset of a broader story and the fortunate among us ration a few for the end, savoring them as that final nightfall advances. Petrakis appears to have plenty of life left in him, but his stock of unclouded days is depleted. Nora, his bride of sixty-two years, passed this summer and the combination of his memory outages and the solitude that her absence compels is more than the old man can manage.
Read more.Generation I
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
I pressed the back of my hand to the smudged glass of the meat case. Warm. “If you don’t refrigerate this lamb it goes bad.” I’ve been arguing this with butchers at this market every week for the past year and a half.
“What can I offer you, brother?” The meat cutter stepped forward wiping his palms across his apron, the new blood and grease mingling with the old. His Russian is broken but more certain than my shaky grasp of the Uzbek language, which I abuse daily in my work on the visa line at the American embassy.
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