In Tongues

The following is from Thomas Grattan’s In Tongues . Grattan is the author of the novel The Recent East , which was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, One Story, Slice , and The Colorado Review . He has an MFA in Fiction Writing from Brooklyn College and has taught middle school English for more than a decade. He lives in upstate New York. On the night Alan, my first serious boyfriend, dumped me, I lay awake on the couch I called ours, though he’d been the one to pay for it, waiting for anger or sadness or relief to come. What showed up instead was the suspended feeling that captures me from time to time even now, like flinging myself from a diving board so I’m not rising or falling but still. That weightlessness stayed as I packed everything worth taking into a pair of duffel bags and stole two hundred dollars from the drawer where Alan kept cash. It held steady as I drove to a dealership, its cars’ windshields laced with frost, and sold my own, lingered as I hitchhiked to the bus station where I waited in line behind a woman who took forever at the ticket counter, the clerk’s mustache trembling with annoyance as she asked one question, then another, a custodian next to us smacking a mop up and down. But then another clerk showed up, sharp lines around her mouth and eyes, and said, “Next.” And, as my bags and I made it to the counter and she asked, “Where to?” my descent began, so I said the first and maybe only place that came to mind, one I’d never been to before. For that daylong bus ride from Minneapolis to New York, stillness switched to falling, though as we passed billboards about all-you-can-eat buffets and abortion, as towns came and went with aluminum-sided sameness, I itched with the excitement of not knowing where I’d land. Where I finally landed was an apartment in an attic above a […]

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