You Tell Me
Fiction Artwork for The New Yorker.
(Excerpt)
The symptoms, Danny was explaining, were textbook: excessive crying, loss of appetite, feelings of hopelessness. Like Sasha, Danny was the kind of person who trusted textbooks. A good student. Sasha couldn’t sleep, or else she slept all day. She was rarely hungry, unless, in a burst of energy, she baked an elaborate cake. The good news was that, on most days, she still went to work. The bad news was that fear—her boss, her deadlines, the phone that she kept under the pillow, buzzing with middle-of-the-night emergencies—was the one thing that got her out of bed.