Troy Nahumko

Some sentences arrive fully formed, requiring no explanation. At six o’clock on an August morning, two hours before I intended to wake, my eighty-year-old mother stood at the bedroom door wearing an expression I had never seen on her face before. She looked as though she had already lived through the day and knew how it…

Act 1. “Go West, young man.” The nineteenth-century newspaper man Horace Greeley is said to have declaimed it first, and he meant it as inspiration. The frontier, the clean slate, the honest wage for honest hands. According to legend, the full quote continues: “There is health in the country, and room away from our crowds of idlers and imbeciles.” One…