Granta 37: The Family
Cover by The Senate
Granta 55: Children - Blind Bitter Happiness
Photograph by Danny Bright (SOA)
Design by The Senate
Granta 97: Best of Young American
Novelists 2 – Image by Pail Elliman
Design by Slabmedia
Fiction
HUFFINGTON
09.23.12
a scene with all the dignity of a
cafeteria food fight. We can’t cure
everybody, but I think most of us
treasure as a small consolation
that at least we can afford people
some kind of dignity at the end,
something quiet and solemn in
which whatever meaning resides
in all of this may be — if we watch
and listen carefully — perceptible.
Which may be why one particular
code persists in my memory, long
after the event.
J
OHN MONGAY WAS
the name I got from
the medicine admitting officer. I wasn’t
sure what to make
of the MAO’s story, but I knew I
didn’t like it.
The story was a 72-year-old
guy with a broken neck. He had
apparently fallen in his driveway while picking up his newspaper that morning, cracking
his first and second vertebrae. I
had a vague memory from medical school that this wasn’t a good
thing — the expression “hangman’s fracture” kept bobbing up
from the well of facts I do not use
— but I had a much more distinct
impression that this was not a