The airport wasn’t just clean, it was shiny, like the glass frame of my college diploma hanging on the wall in my mother’s living room or the wine glasses set around the table for my father’s dinner parties; shiny like the veneers on the housewives who lived in my childhood neighborhood or the Mercedes my bosses drove.
On that night, I would have been more comfortable in a dirty airport—a place where cancelled flights forced travelers to crowd together on the floor and use their luggage as pillows, their jackets as blankets; a place that pulsated through the entire night with the chatter of whiskey-drinking storytellers, all settling into the cozy dirtiness.
—An excerpt from my forthcoming novel Isn’t It Pretty To Think So? The first 40 pages have been uploaded here.
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