Mark Chiusano - Marine Park - Stories

We got the tree tied on top of the van, this old green minivan we’ve had for a long time, and we started driving back. It was all easier than one time I remember — Seven years ago, my mother said. Maybe ten, she added — it was one of those two. That year, we got to Knapp Street and had the tree on top but couldn’t make the car start. We called Triple A. Meanwhile, a blizzard started. Soon the snow was up to our ankles, and we were getting cold, and Triple A wasn’t coming. I remember walking back to the house, all four of us with our hats and gloves on, looking like a ridiculous collection of amateur snowmen. Avenue R was disappearing beneath our boots. The news said things were happening elsewhere, but we couldn’t tell. I almost didn’t recognize the house until it was upon us, strange and framed by snowdrifts, crowded in by all the other homes. The Christmas lights were on in the window but there was an empty space in the center, for where we would put the tree.

[Fluffer Nutter]

Thanks to Amy Hempel, who is a force of nature. Thanks to the incredible Bret Johnston and the Harvard English Department. Thanks to Jackie Ko, for expert guidance from beginning to end in addition to unflappable, undying support, along with Diego Núñez and everyone at Wylie. Thanks to Allison Lorentzen, who made this book better than it deserves to be and who knows what you see through the window on the Q, and thanks to Nick Bromley and copy editor Ryan Sullivan and everyone at Penguin. The story “Shatter the Trees and Blow Them Away” owes much to Richard Rhodes’s remarkable The Making of the Atomic Bomb . Thanks to Andrew Miller and Jenny Jackson, Caroline Bleeke, Sofia Groopman, and Christina Thompson. To the Whelehans. To Emily Moore and the Byrnes family. Thanks to Charlotte Alter, for reading first and last and everything else. Most of all, for my family — my grandparents; aunts and uncles; my parents, Mary and Ken Chiusano; and my brother, Scott Chiusano. Who else to write for but them.