He’s a decade younger than she is and always seems to be both freshly showered and freshly bathed in Patchouli. He’s the kind of person who smiles so frequently and so genuinely Alice has long assumed he’d turn up on America’s Most Wanted. “Whoa, hey, sorry!” Stuart holds his hands up like someone has just said stick-em-up. He enters her office and touches her shoulder. She puts her head in her hands and stops her ears with her thumbs, a habit she reverts to when her concentration is flagging, which is why she doesn’t hear Stuart rap at her open door. She has the proposal spread out on her desk and the notes of two levels of junior evaluators and the organization’s funding history pulled up on her computer screen. Her department has millions of dollars to divvy and she is attempting to take the task seriously. Alice knows her instincts, political and otherwise, are not always as they should be.Īlice attempts to apply herself to the slickly produced grant proposal she’s supposed to be considering. Suzanne had looked at her as if she, Alice, were briefly a stranger. Back in February, when crowds were massing in front of the Massachusetts Supreme Court, half waving rainbow flags and half holding signs proclaiming God’s judgment on the flag wavers, Alice had asked Suzanne, “What’s the big deal over one stupid word? Let the straight people keep marriage if civil unions mean the same thing. Some of this is grief, she is certain, but she fears some of it is simply her. There seems to be no measure for how terrible something is, or what she is supposed to care about. She feels as if the world has tilted sideways and she can no longer tell the difference between personal catastrophes and geo-political ones. Alice knows she is supposed to be outraged about this fact but can’t muster the energy. A court in California has decided the mayor of San Francisco had no right to start marrying gay people. Her capacity to imagine things has proven unrelated to their capacity to happen.

Another four years of W seems impossible to imagine, but four years ago she wouldn’t have imagined the Twin Towers falling or her parents dying or Suzanne leaving her. The presidential campaign is stressing her out. She cannot listen to the news on public radio any longer. Her now-silent office on the 12 th floor of an Art Deco skyscraper on Dearborn is mercilessly air conditioned, but beyond the plate glass of her windows, she knows the city is sweltering through another white-skied August afternoon. Fiction by Laura Krughoff noteable Living AloneĪlice clicks off the radio on her desk.

Wake in the Night by Laura Krughoff