“ I had a handleless cup of hot, stale tea, poured and reheated from a pail stored in the restaurant’s walkin refrigerator, and one elegantly folded fortune cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear. I would tug the paper slip from the stiff clutches of the cookie and save it as a bookmark. All my books had fortunes protruding like tiny tails from their pages: You are the crispy noodle in the salad of life. You are the master of your own destiny.
Childcare: new short fiction by Lorrie Moore in the New Yorker.
