Lorrie Moore’s stories are about the abrupt and the absurd. In ‘Wings’—which is either about a woman and the men who trip her into the rest of her life, or about the unit of a couple and its inner dreaming, depending on how you read it—time curdles down to a haze of everyday coffees, dinners, music, walks and swims. KC and Dench are unfunny but earnest, like all lovers. They are hemmed into loneliness, their conversations scratching hard and daily on the same, brazen grooves of youth. “Patience was a chemical. Derived from a mineral. Derived from a star. She felt she had a bit of it. But it was not always fruitful, or fruitful with the right fruit,” writes Moore. The story ends on a perpetual summer. Moore never dims the light on their interior boredoms, or on the question of what lies beyond a young life—a feat which is exhausting but wondrous to witness, like the first hot day of the year.
First published in The Paris Review, Issue 200, Spring 2012, and available to read online here. Collected in Bark, Knopf/Faber, 2014. Chosen by Sharanya, who lives, writes and teaches between Essex and London.
