“Boris, I can’t goof around,” I said, pocketing the earrings and the charm bracelet. “If we’re going, we need to leave now. Before people start showing up.”

“Speaks of me? Oh yeah? What’d he say?”

“I got trampled in a stall and broke my shoulder and there I was in the infirmary with this view of the empty driveway and no car coming up it. Not one fucking person came to visit me, not even Gaga.”

Mother, I thought, Mother, trying to send her a psychic message that I was alive.

Clearly I’d been blasted out of my mind when I wrapped and taped it: all those layers of newspaper, wound with a whole extra-large roll of heavy-duty, fiber-reinforced packing tape, had seemed like a prudent caution when I was freaked out and high

“Lots of goings-on. Her aunt is taking her to Texas.” “Texas?” I said, after a stunned pause. “Afraid so.” “When?” “Day after tomorrow.” “No!”

The photo on the iPhone was of a snow-topped chalet and, out in front, a beautiful blonde on skis. At her side, also on skis, were a pair of bundled-up little blond kids of indeterminate sex.

Murky portraits, china spaniels on the mantelpiece, golden pendulum swinging, tockety-tock, tockety-tock.

It didn’t look so much like a snapshot as an ad for some healthful Swiss product like yogurt or Bircher muesli.

Boris pale and pasty, with his shoplifted apples and his Russian-language novels, gnawed-down fingernails and shoelaces dragging in the dust.

“It was the hypothermia that got Daddy. He’d gotten so thin, no body fat on him at all, an hour and a half in the water was enough to do it, floundering around at those temperatures.”

It was a small picture, the smallest in the exhibition, and the simplest: a yellow finch, against a plain, pale ground, chained to a perch by its twig of an ankle.

She liked to call her friend Courtney and “vent,” and a lot of her venting, unfortunately, was on the subject of me.

“There are other considerations, as well. I mean—” decorous silence—“I don’t know if I ought to tell you this, but an unauthorized party has twice tried to make a large withdrawal on the account.”

An every-other-day habit still a habit, as Jerome had often reminded me, particularly when I didn’t stick too faithfully to the every-other-day part.

I wasn’t so sure I loved Kitsey either (at least not the way I’d once wished I loved her) but still it was surprising just how bad I felt, considering I’d been through the routine before.

Outside: rain.

if you’re missing the goldfinch bot, i have set it up again on bluesky, @/goldfinch-bot.bsky.social . fuck elon musk, get off twitter/X <3

(btw, the bot stopped working here because of the paywall to the twitter api, so bluesky will be the future of the goldfinch bot. it was great here while it lasted ^_^)