? ?: A Novel

- - is a blank city. There’s a sick glow to the clouds, and it always seems to be raining here even when it isn’t. Only sad and wounded people live here anymore. They are homeless in their apartments. They are unemployed at their jobs. They are widows in their marriage beds and celibates in amours and loners with many friends because - - is a sad city, full of sad and lonely people. I can’t say very much about myself now, only that we have known each other before and for a very short, very slight while. We had a class together and I grew up down the block and our mothers say hello still from time to time in the aisles of a grocery store somewhere north of Tampa. Somewhere deep in Maryland. Somewhere down in Solano County. Somewhere out where the winds never seem to change and the days tick by like cars on a beltway. Things have not worked out for me in life as they may have for you. I have seen your visions of this world flickering on the outsides of my eyelids for a very long time and now and for many other reasons, I cannot stand to see them anymore.

Wade Parrish was raised in Louisville, Kentucky around horses and horticulture. He wrote — — while living in New York at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. He now lives in Boston, Massachusetts where he studies law.