AB Intra

Donald Trump was elected president on the intervening Tuesday. On Saturday afternoon, Mo watched Kathleen in her driveway, hammering what looked like scrap lumber into a massive oak post, an old-fashioned, beautiful thing, like a stylized tree trunk acquiring rough approximations of branches. — MATTISON

Iloved imagining my parents at this time, so young and eager for life, so in love, and copulating with faulty diaphragmatic devices to prevent what became the inevitable penetration of sperm into egg, fertilizing a life they did not want. I wondered why my mother had told me this story of my unwanted beginning. — WALI

A

t a certain point you lose the right to say my child, and not just because the possessive pronoun legally dissolves at eighteen. Every one of the original cells you gave them is gone. The language you gave them is superseded. — DAVIS-WILLIAMS

The north-facing slope, normally heavily vegetated and a little damper than the surrounding chaparral, burned unevenly and left a mosaic of live thickets, long vertical strips of empty space, black trunks, a brief wash of green for a few weeks in the spring. That’s how my brain feels, like it’s been burned off in patches. — Slaughter

C

hug Mountain Dew Diet and pump drum n’ bass through my headphones like some hacker in a cyberpunk movie, pull up the Tor browser and navigate to Silk Road 6 or whatever market hadn’t been exit-scammed yet that week. At first it was just the weed. — Kuhn

W

ith a pocketknife, I would pry the oysters into a net, then with one drop of air left in my lungs and parrotfish sailing around me, I’d race to the surface, let out a bellowing yelp, and climb aboard, nearly tipping over the canoe each time. Back on the beach, I’d write about my discoveries. — heise

B

ut that of course was the fashion right now, despise the experts, the “elite,” the insiders. Why expect a majority of an English department to act any differently than the United States presently at large in Trump’s America? Sometimes her innocence even astounded her! — latiolais

A

t home, we stared at the television for three days, eating whatever we ate on card tables bearing the identical images of a squirrel sitting on a log and nibbling on his own meal of a rather too large nut, staring back at us as he did so. Such are my only memories of this transformational event. — Lawless

M

oreover, to not think of stars, really, as anything but distant and intangible light, romantic augmentation to the unaccountable continuum of your young life that started as you first looked up and saw the twinkling heavens in their artificial but plausible verisimilitude in the dark vault of the Fox Arlington Theater when you were seven. — Buckley

B

ut the cool thing about being scum is that you know your friends are also scum and everyone else knows you’re scum, so they leave you alone. People walk the other side of the street when they see us coming and they ignore us like people ignore my mom, and I wonder if they see her face in my face. — Lewis

A

fter a month of reading, it was this concept of drifting through the landscape, letting one’s unconscious whims break up the paths of habit and the rigidity of reason, that got him out of his chair, up on his feet, away from his books, and out on a walk — not to his office or the library, to home or the grocery store, but somewhere new. — Roth

I

ran because I had never in my life dreamt, and ever since I was a girl I believed that the more I heard the dreams of others, the less likely I would be to dream my own dreams. The dreams of others were a violence wrought upon my world. — Sharpless

I

found Portland where I left it, but like I’ve never seen it before. An epic heat wave had scorched all the moss on church steps and trees and walls, and the cars danced the spaghetti-legs dance with the pavement set on high heat, and all the hipsters’ seasonal beards were gone-gone. — prcic