It’s like a switch, friends who have boys tell me: one day it goes on, and after that things are never the same, the door closes on one side and opens to another, and that’s that. Another friend, a man, says that he had been a quiet reader all through childhood, and then between one month and the next he began to throw chairs. This worries the older one, too: the possibility that he will no longer be who he has always been, that he will lose something of his sensitivity, so valued by everyone who loves him, that he will become capable of violence. When I go to kiss him good night, he curls his body into mine and in a nervous voice tells me that he wants to remain a child, that he doesn’t want anything to change. But already he is no longer a child. He is standing out on a bank between the shore and a sea that goes on and on, and the water, as they say, is rising.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgment is due to the following publications, in which these stories first appeared:

“Future Emergencies,” originally published in Esquire, November 1, 2002.

“Future Emergencies,” selected for Best American Short Stories, edited by Katrina Kenison and Walter Mosley (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).

“In the Garden,” originally published as “An Arrangement of Light” by Byliner, August 2012.

“I Am Asleep but My Heart Is Awake,” originally published in the New Republic , December 30, 2013.

“Zusya on the Roof,” originally published in the New Yorker , February 4, 2013.

“Seeing Ershadi,” originally published in the New Yorker , March 5, 2018.

“Seeing Ershadi,” selected for Best American Short Stories, edited by Anthony Doerr and Heidi Pitlor (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019).

“Switzerland,” originally published in the New Yorker , September 2020.

“To Be a Man,” originally published in the Atlantic, October 1, 2020.

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