‘Good aardvark, with a long nose and a hairy snout.’

I could hear the words coming out of my friend’s mouth, but assumed my ears were deceiving me. Surely I misheard him.

Most of Jacob’s victims were pretty baffled, but he always got away with it. Their usual response was a very polite delivery of something like, ‘Very well, thank you.’ Or ‘Oh yes, good afternoon to you too.’ As intended, they had interpreted his ambiguous cacophony as, ‘Good afternoon, babble, friendly babble …’ And would end up blaming themselves for not hearing correctly.

The morning after Astrid sprains her sternum at the Baptist Indoor Beach Party, I arrive at orchestra rehearsal with my cello. I tighten my bow and swipe its horse hairs across a crumbling mass of dark rosin. Orchestra is my favorite class. I relish every early morning musical moment before enduring the rest of my sophomore schedule. I take my seat in the second chair of the cello section next to Milo, who plays third chair and can barely read music. The first chair, which belongs to Astrid, the virtuoso of the 1995-96 Trojan Orchestra, sits empty. 

Our antiquated names for the days of the week are hopelessly irrelevant and should’ve been replaced sometime during the reign of Charlemagne.  It’s true that we still have a sun and a moon (or Mon) but we only think of the moon when making love en plein air and we only think of the sun when it’s too hot or has gone AWOL because it’s January.  We might vaguely remember Woden and Thor (garbled into Wed and Thur) from Norse mythology, but, have you ever given them a serious thought?  How did a good Roman like Saturn wander in among these horn-hatted Vikings?  Anyway, can you name a classical deity more obscure than Saturn?  As for “Tue” and “Fri,” I neither know nor care who they are.  Perhaps they used to be worshipped in the Seychelles Islands.

When I moved to Seattle from a small town two hours south, I loved looking out my window and seeing evidence of other people: blinking marquee lights, flickering TV screens, the line of cars crawling up and down Queen Anne Hill. The people whom, barring a catastrophe, I would never have to know. I inherited this worldview—that the best neighbors were strangers who stayed that way—from my mom.

When I was a kid, we had chicken for dinner every Friday night. Shortly after my fifth birthday I figured out how these meals worked: your age determined the part of the chicken you ate. As the youngest, I ate wings. My older brother was assigned drumsticks. My much older sister, white meat.