Three Stories

Masterpiece

A week before my birthday, I spent the night with my friends, a husband and wife who lived outside Charlotte. They moved to the state when I did and enrolled their daughter in pre-school. We didn’t do much that night: had dinner and drinks, played cards, ate a gummy. The next morning, I sat with the husband at their kitchen table while he drank coffee. Their daughter sat in another chair and sketched on her tablet. Her head struggled to reach the table, but I could tell she was mouthing the words of whatever she drew.  

The wife walked in with her phone and sat down. Her posture indicated she had an announcement to make. “I’m so sad,” she said. “Mr. Rutabaga just died.” Mr. Rutabaga was her high school art teacher. She worked in insurance, though she was once a painter. She had a studio set up in their garage, which I guess meant she was still a painter after all. 

“How old was he?” her husband asked. 

“Eighty-one,” she answered. 

“Oh, eighty-one,” he said. “Wow.” 

The wife looked at him. The husband sipped his coffee and placed the cup back on the table. His posture too indicated he had something to announce. “The thresher comes for us all!” he said and laughed. His wife stood up and left the room. I looked at their daughter, but her head was still down.

On the drive home, I thought of the attraction I’d felt for the wife during her pregnancy. I’d never felt such attraction for her before, not even in college when I was attracted to everybody. I’d heard of the pregnancy glow, but didn’t expect to feel it so palpably. How do I put it? It was like the moment before you touch the plastic fruit.

I sped up and passed a car, then the road dipped into a long, slow decline. An old man stood by the side of the road, wearing a cap and overalls. “Old man,” I mouthed. His arm rested on the mailbox next to him so I assumed he was waiting for the mail. That’s what old men do when they live in rural areas and want to feel useful. I craned my neck around after I drove past, so I could keep looking at him, though this was dangerous. When I turned again to the road, the only vehicle I saw was a garbage truck in the distance. It too was driving down a long, slow decline. Soon we’d meet at the bottom of the bowl, there, in the middle.

Celery

Gary wakes up in the middle of the night and can’t find his wife. He walks around the house looking for her, then calls the police.

The police arrive and find Gary’s wife, who has been asleep in bed all this time. Gary has called enough times that the police charge him a fee for their visits, which they have deemed unnecessary. But to Gary the visits are necessary: they help him find his wife. Fining Gary is supposed to discourage him from making future calls, although this logic is suspicious. How will Gary remember the reason for these fines when he can’t even remember that his wife is next to him in bed? He is 84 and he calls celery “salsa.” 

I almost called this “Cruelty,” but then I worried that the cruelty I referred to might be ambiguous. It could mean the cruelty of Gary’s age, or the cruelty of his waking up in the middle of the night unable to find his wife of fifty years, or the cruelty of his wife watching her husband chip away. It could mean the cruelty of writing this. I’m referring, however, to the police, whose cruelty consists of making Gary pay for all the other cruelties. The next night, Gary wakes up and is alone again. He picks up the phone.

John Newton

The other day, a friend told me an anecdote about a lecture he attended, entitled “Equity and Power in Art Studio Critique.” During the presentation, a painting professor asked the lecturer, an art historian, why it was wrong to ask students about their work as it pertained to their race. By students, the painter meant students of color, which is the term many white academics use in reference to a group of people they consider important, but only because that group has the ability to make them look bad. The art historian told the painter he should be careful asking students questions about race, since the painter was white. Then the art historian referenced his own Latino heritage to detail the problems therein. 

My friend related this anecdote because the painter’s last name was Castagno and the art historian’s Castellini. “See what I mean?” I interrupted. Of course, I hadn’t said anything yet. 

I meant that here was Castagno and here Castellini, and one guy’s parents immigrated to this latitude and the other guy’s parents immigrated to that, which meant that Castagno’s father was from New York and Castellini’s father from Mexico. This meant Castellini was Latino and thus in position to correct Castagno, who was not Latino but Italian or Italian-American or white with Italian heritage, which Castellini also was—white with Italian heritage—which meant nothing whatsoever and quite a lot as well.

Not that I disagreed with Castellini. All of these things are confusing. I just felt I had to say something—that I was expected to say something—because my name is Cannelini.

The painter was actually from Connecticut, though he lived for a time in Brooklyn, as many professors do. Of course, neither Castellini nor Castagno were their real names.

My friend changed the subject.

A week later, I attended the memorial of a former colleague over Zoom. I could only attend a half hour because I had to teach afterwards. The memorial opened with a photo montage of the deceased, set to “Amazing Grace.” I don’t often cry, but I did then. I attributed this to a fondness for the colleague, though I barely knew him; he had once corrected my pronunciation of Charon, the mythological ferryman, during a Q&A. The song made me cry as well—“Amazing Grace” often does—and so did the sadness I spend my life unable to put into words. But then the montage glitched and the image froze, and I could hear the graduate student whose computer it was curse quietly. The moment no longer felt natural, even though it never had been. Not knowing what to do, I opened up a new window and went back to work.

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Thomas Mira y Lopez is the author of the essay collection The Book of Resting Places and a translator from Portuguese. A 2025 NEA Fellow in Translation and a fiction editor at DIAGRAM, he lives in Iowa City, where he teaches Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Iowa.