SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN

1 4 4 Y S E V E N M I N U T E S I N H E A V E N M E L I S S A S T E I N It’s all the rage to sport waxed moustaches and cure your own sausages in some mildewy basement that formerly would have hosted convulsively awkward parties with spin the bottle and seven minutes in the dark and terrifying closet (a.k.a. heaven) but now boasts sopressata strung on repurposed vintage drying racks and fat clay pots of kombucha and curdling hops. Personally I’ve never recovered from the sex-shaped void left in those closets by all the groping that should have occurred to me but didn’t: right under my nose kids my age were creeping into adulthood one clammy, trembling palm on one breast at a time. There was also the horror of not being chosen in gym. It is conceivable that learning intricately how to butcher an entire hog and render every morsel might give one a feeling of mastery one lacked in childhood. It is the greatest immaturity to believe su√ering entitles you to something someone wiser and quite possibly grayer than I once said. But in those basements and carpools and playgrounds as I assassinated one by one clandestinely my torturers abandoning their foul normal bodies to compost the astonishing tedium of the wending suburban lanes, 1 4 5 R I was transubstantiating to supernal fame and beauty and such eerie genius that entire books were written about my books. In fact it takes a long time to realize your su√ering is of very little consequence to anyone but you. And by that time the future is already happening and you’re pickling okra and star fruit and foraging for morels in urban forests and suspending artisan mozzarella in little wet nets and crafting small-batch, nitrite-free data and maybe even thinking about having children, which you swore in a million billion years you would never do. ...