30 Quotes by Boris Fishman

No one was dead, but her son would not call just to call. She’d had to enter intimate terms with this new understanding in her life, like an illness.

The bed was empty when he awoke. A note was taped to the bathroom mirror. “Did we? We should. XOXO.

One night, unable to sleep, I tiptoed into the hallway and overheard my grandfather telling a table of acquaintances about the expensive Armenian cognac with which he had once plied the surgeon who was going to remove my grandmother’s gallbladder the next morning. They drank so much tat the surgeon was still drunk when he picked up the scalpel. The table roared, though my grandmother did not.

Can’t I?” he said. “Did you know that they fertilized crops with human ash? After the war, the tomatoes were the size of an infant’s head.” He gave the words the same inflection that his grandfather did, only in English. They had a new but not unfamiliar sound on his tongue. He knew how to say them.

Even an iridescent pigeon at Slava’s feet – as a flying creature, arguably prone to curiosity about the gentleman invading its airspace – was more concerned with a triangle of pizza on the ground, approaching it as shyly as a girl at a dance.

Even though they, each for his own reason, did not wish to end the conversation, they had come to the end of what they could say in peace, and said goodbye.

He never pays enough attention to anything for it to touch him.

Only weariness remained. It was a special kind of weariness that descended rarely, according to internal chemical regimens he did not understand. It made striving difficult, but also falsehood.

Slava’s father had been made docile by his parents-in-law, though he kicked the television once because why did these people control their lives.