Six Texts at Splice

Splice has published six new texts—"MIDDLE AGE," "THE FIVE WS," "SUCCESSFUL," "TRY AGAIN," and "CHURCH CAMP"—as part of their publication week celebration of Babel, my new collection of stories. Here's the first sentence of "THE FIVE WS":

A woman from Orlando, they say, forty-two years old, mother to a young son, or so the rumor goes, ex-wife to a man who lived only minutes away from the apartment she shared with her longtime boyfriend, both a complainant and an alleged perpetrator in a 2018 domestic assault — she claimed the boyfriend had pulled her upstairs by her hair and kicked her in the eye; her boyfriend claimed she had strangled him until he almost passed out and he kicked her only to prevent her from killing him; charges in both cases were ultimately dropped — a woman whose Facebook page reveals that her favorite quote is “Anything worth doing, is worth doing well,” which, comma aside, is a paraphrase of something Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield once wrote (a man who was largely responsible for Britain adopting the Gregorian Calendar, less a thing “done well” than a thing done somewhat better than what had come before), a woman who has been charged with second-degree murder.