an excerpt from “No Man’s Brooklyn”

Remember when we were kids and we’d sometimes have sleepovers and listen to the dark together? That’s what you called it, Anya, listening to the dark.

Sometimes we’d pretend to be camping. We’d set up a tent and eat candy and look up at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling, and the planets and meteors too. The stars were yellow and the meteors were red and the planets were all different colors. And you’d say let’s be quiet and listen to the dark and we’d listen for a little while but you could never keep quiet for long and you’d start asking me questions like what did the dark sound like to me and what was I thinking but my favorite part were those intervals of silence when we were not only listening to the dark but also breathing it and perhaps dreaming it…