Longreads

[Fiction] When one person loves the other just a little more:

"William was tall and thin and shy and awkward in school. His best social tool was that he played the piano, and so was recruited for school musicals, which placed him at rehearsals and cast parties with kids he would otherwise scarcely have known. He thought he would be either a pianist or a physicist, although he didn’t know anyone in Montana who did those things professionally. His piano teacher was a banker’s widow who gave lessons in her lace-curtained house, and his physics teacher was primarily the wrestling coach. But William could imagine another kind of life."

[Fiction] A sisters' weekend and an unexpected encounter bring back memories:

"When Trisha comes to town we have to go out. She’s the bitterest soccer mom of all time and as part of her escape from home she wants to get drunk and complain about her workaholic husband and over-scheduled, ungrateful children. No one appreciates how much she does for them. All she does is give, give, give, without getting anything back, et cetera. I don’t really mind—I enjoy a good martini, and while Trisha rants I don’t have to worry about getting sloppy, given that she’s always sloppier—except that even her complaints are part boast. She has to mention her busy husband and the two hundred thousand he rakes in a year. Her children’s after-school activities for the gifted are just so freaking expensive and time-consuming. There’s a needle in every one of these remarks, pricking at my skin, saying See, Sherri? See?"

[Fiction] A teenager's grief and its aftermath:

"Years later, you would wonder if it hadn't been for your brother would you have done it? You’d remember how all the other guys had hated on her—how skinny she was, no culo, no titties, como un palito, but your brother didn't care. I'd fuck her.

"You'd fuck anything, someone jeered.

"And he had given that someone the eye. You make that sound like it's a bad thing."

[Fiction] Excerpt from McEwan's forthcoming novel Sweet Tooth. A young woman is introduced to the man who would recruit her to MI5:

"My name is Serena Frome (rhymes with 'plume'), and forty years ago, in my final year at Cambridge, I was recruited by the British security service. In the early spring of 1972, when exams were only weeks away, I found a new boyfriend, a historian called Jeremy Mott. He was of a certain old-fashioned type—lanky, large-nosed, with an out-sized Adam’s apple. He was unkempt, clever in an understated way, and extremely polite. I’d noticed quite a few of his sort around. They all seemed to have descended from a single family and to have come from private schools in the North of England where they were issued with the same clothes."

[Fiction] [Not single-page] Mail-order brides on a journey across the ocean:

"On the boat we were mostly virgins. We had long black hair and flat wide feet and we were not very tall. Some of us had eaten nothing but rice gruel as young girls and had slightly bowed legs, and some of us were only fourteen years old and were still young girls ourselves. Some of us came from the city, and wore stylish city clothes, but many more of us came from the country and on the boat we wore the same old kimonos we’d been wearing for years – faded hand-me-downs from our sisters that had been patched and re-dyed many times. Some of us came from the mountains and had never before seen the sea, except for in pictures, and some of us were the daughters of fishermen who had been around the sea all our lives. Perhaps we had lost a brother or father to the sea, or a fiancé, or perhaps someone we loved had jumped into the water one unhappy morning and simply swum away, and now it was time for us, too, to move on."

[Fiction] A born-again adolescent takes a joyride with his wandering uncle:

"My parents and I had been waiting for Uncle Skillet to show up for five hours, wasting an entire Saturday as far as I was concerned, and not just any old Saturday but a glorious early summer one of God’s pure sunshine and chirping birds, a day so perfect that kids who were allowed to wear next to no clothes would be at the swimming pool all day long, and I’d have the perfect excuse to push the lawnmower by and get a look at Sage Ekhart in a bikini laying on a towel by the Coke machines. I was not allowed to wear next to no clothes, was not allowed to go to the pool. I was spending this Saturday in church pants with suspenders, my shirt tucked in, wearing loafers, pretending to watch television while we waited on Uncle Skillet."

(Thanks, Instafiction)

The untold story of George W. Bush's service in the Air National Guard. Hagan revisits the mystery that led to the downfall of CBS's Dan Rather—with new details on what may have really happened when Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972:

"The CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage."

[Fiction] The life of a supposed hedonist:

"Kromer knew it was also his job, what he was a clerk at. The shop was called Sex Machines. There Kromer retailed chunky purple phalluses, vials of space-age lubricant, silver balls and beads for insertion, latex dolphins with oscillating beaks. The shop’s owner was a maven of Second Avenue, a hedgehog-like, grubby genius of street-level commerce. The possessor of a block of storefronts, his specialty lay in preëmpting hipster entrepreneurship with his own fake-indigenous coffee shops, video-rental emporiums, and, finally, the erotic boutique."

[Fiction] An elderly woman encounters her past at her nursing home:

"A beautiful day—even though Elise can smell chickens from the poultry complex down the road and exhaust from the interstate, even though the pear trees in this so-called orchard bear no fruit. The mums are in bloom. Bees glitter above the beds. And a skinny man comes toward her, showing off his mastery of the strap-on LIMBs.

"'Elise.' He squints at her. 'You still got it. Prettiest girl at Eden Village.'

"She flashes her dentures but says nothing."