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LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE CONTEMPORARY POETRY: READ ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF POETRY: SJOHNNA MCCRAY WINS THE WALT WHITMAN AWARD

SHORT STORIES FROM AWARD WINNERS: 2015

SEPTEMBER ISSUE OF LEPORTRAIT MAGAZINE SHOW CASES THE WORKS OF FAMOUS AWARD WINNING WRITERS OF POETRY, SHORT STORIES AND NOVELS.

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CONTENTS CONTEMPORARY POETRY: READ ABOUT THE EVOLUTION OF POETRY: sjohnna mccray wins the walt whitman award SHORT STORIES FROM AWARD WINNERS: 2015 frank o’connor international short story award winner the redemption of Galen pike NIGERIAN FOLK STORY: The Woman with Two Skins BOOK TO READ: Playing in the light by zoe wicomb FAMOUS POETRY: If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe, There is another sky by Emily Dickinson JAMES AUGUSTINE ALOYSIUS JOYCE: A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - Poem by James Joyce

HEALTH AND BEAUTY: How to wash your hair, How does healthy eating affect mental and emotional health?

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The Evolution of Poetry A good place to start when looking back at how poetry has evolved over time is with epic poetry. Most of the earliest known poetry was a form of epic poetry, some of which dates back centuries before humans began writing down their stories. One of the earliest poetic works, the "Epic of Gilgamesh," dates back to around 2000 B.C., when it was part of the oral tradition of the Sumerians.

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developed to help storytellers, who often acted as historians, memorize their stories more easily. As a written text, the epic poem about King Gilgamesh dates back to around 1000 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans, between about 1200 B.C. and A.D. 455, were also known for their great epic poetry. Two of the most famous Greek poets were Homer, who wrote the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey," and Hesiod, who wrote "Works and Days." The ancient Greeks used poetry in music and theater, and loved to write about their gods and the heroic deeds of great people.

By medieval times -- about 455 to 1485 -- poets began to play with both the subject matter and language of their poems. Some medieval poets, like Geoffrey Chaucer, even experimented with writing in the language of the common people, known as vernacular. Before that, most scholarly and artistic works were written in Latin.

During the Renaissance period (1485-1660), poets got even more creative. They developed new structures and forms of meter. Playwrights like William Shakespeare and Thomas Marlowe incorporated poetry in their plays, in what is known as verse drama. Structures and styles, as well as adding layers of meaning to poems, became very popular.

During the Enlightenment period (1660-1790), there was a big interest in returning to the styles of the classical Greeks. There was a lot of emphasis on formal styles and discipline in writing during this time.

During the Romantic period (1790-1830), on the other hand, there was a big departure from the methods of poets during the Enlightenment. The Romantics were all about finding new ways to express themselves. Romantic writers focused on individuality and nature, and valued creativity over logic. Poets, like Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, explored new forms and themes during this time. In the United States, new poetic styles emerged out of the transcendentalist movement.

Transcendentalists wanted to break away from the established institutions of society. Like the Romantic writers in England, they focused on creativity, nature and individuality.

During the Victorian period (1832-1901), writers continued to break away from the established forms and structures that had been developing during the previous literary periods. Poets like Walt Whitman began writing in free verse, or completely without meter.

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Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been many changes to the way poetry is written and read. Read on to find out more.

Poetry in the 20th Century and Today By the beginning of the 20th century, poetry had come a long way. Some poets loved using prescribed structures and forms, while others rejected these ideas completely and tried to do their own thing.

The early 20th century saw a lot of push against formal structure and style. The modernist movement of the early 1900s was in a way fighting back against the idea that poetry should be elegant and beautiful. Poems became shorter and more concise -- a much simpler, less ornate style was preferred. Some famous modernist poets include W.B. Yeats, Robert Frost and W.H. Auden.

After about 1945, the postmodern movement brought more abstract and experimental styles to poetry. Text could be fragmented and sometimes very obscure. From the postmodern movement came the beat poets, such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, who rebelled against mainstream society in their themes and styles. From the beat movement emerged a style known as spoken word, which is a type of poetry that is both performed and makes some kind of a statement (typically something political).

Today, you can find poets and poetry of all sorts. While poetry may not be as much a part of the mainstream as it had been in previous generations, it's certainly not a lost art form if you know where to look. Many bars, cafĂŠs and schools still host poetry readings where experienced or novice poets can share their work with others.

One great way to hear modern poets today is to attend a poetry slam, which is a competition where poets battle against one another and are judged on their poem performances. Some poetry slams use an elimination system and a series of elimination rounds through which poets must progress.

Some people also look at music as a form of poetry. Musicians like Bob Dylan are well known for the poetic qualities of the lyrics they write. Rap music also is known to follow many of the structures, meters and rhyme schemes that are associated with poetry.

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Listen...

With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall.

(Adelaide Crapsey's Night")

"November

Imagine a skunk who proposes, To his true love, surrounded by roses.

It may turn out just fine, When she falls for his line, But I wonder if flowers have noses?

(Sarah Fanny)

Walt Whitman Award The Walt Whitman Award is a $5,000 first-book publication prize. The winning manuscript, chosen by an acclaimed poet, is published by Graywolf Press, a leading independent publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of contemporary American and international literature. The winner also receives an all-expenses-paid six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Center in the Umbrian region of Italy, and distribution of the winning book to thousands of Academy of American Poets members.

The award was established in 1975 to encourage the work of emerging poets and to enable the publication of a poet’s first book. It is made possible by financial support from the members of the Academy of American Poets.

Sjohnna McCray

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Sjohnna McCray was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on March 7, 1972. He studied at Ohio University and earned an MFA from the University of Virginia where he was a Hoyns Fellow. McCray also received an MA in English Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

His poetry collection, Rapture, was selected by Tracy K. Smith as the winner of the 2015 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and will be published by Graywolf Press in 2016.

About Rapture, Smith writes, “These poems are so beautifully crafted, so courageous in their truth-telling, and so full of what I like to think of as lyrical wisdom—the visceral revelations that only music, gesture and image, working together, can impart—that not only did they stop me in my tracks as a judge, but they changed me as a person. Sjohnna McCray’s is an ecstatic and original voice, and he lends it to family, history, race and desire in ways that are healing and enlarging. Rapture announces a prodigious talent and a huge human heart.”

McCray’s poems have been published in numerous journals, including Chicago Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review.

His honors include the AWP Intro Journal Award, Ohio University’s Emerson Poetry Prize, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. In addition to poetry, he has published essays on race, mental illness, and homosexuality in various journals.

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McCray has taught in New York City, Phoenix, and Chicago. He currently lives Savannah, Georgia, where he teaches in the English department at Savannah State University.

If You Forget Me by Pablo Neruda I want you to know one thing.

You know how this is: if I look at the crystal moon, at the red branch of the slow autumn at my window, if I touch near the fire the impalpable ash or the wrinkled body of the log, everything carries me to you, as if everything that exists, aromas, light, metals, were little boats that sail toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now, if little by little you stop loving me I shall stop loving you little by little.

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you forget me do not look for me, for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad, the wind of banners that passes through my life, and you decide to leave me at the shore of the heart where I have roots, remember that on that day, at that hour, I shall lift my arms and my roots will set off to seek another land.

But if each day, each hour, you feel that you are destined for me with implacable sweetness, if each day a flower climbs up to your lips to seek me, ah my love, ah my own, in me all that fire is repeated, in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten, my love feeds on your love, beloved, and as long as you live it will be in your arms without leaving mine

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and II took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow-You are not wrong, who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar Of a surf-tormented shore, And I hold within my hand Grains of the golden sand-How few! yet how they creep Through my fingers to the deep, While I weep--while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp Them with a tighter clasp?

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One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem But a dream within a dream?

There is another sky by Emily Dickinson There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there; Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields Here is a little forest, Whose leaf is ever green; Here is a brighter garden, Where not a frost has been; In its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum: Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come!

Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up Like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore-And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over-like a syrupy sweet?

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Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

The Woman with Two Skins Eyamba I. of Calabar was a very powerful king. He fought and conquered all the surrounding countries, killing all the old men and women, but the able-bodied men and girls he caught and brought back as slaves, and they worked on the farms until they died.

This king had two hundred wives, but none of them had borne a son to him. His subjects, seeing that he was becoming an old man, begged him to marry one of the spider’s daughters, as they always had plenty of children. But when the king saw the spider’s daughter he did not like her, as she was ugly, and the people said it was because her mother had had so many children at the same time. However, in order to please his people he married the ugly girl, and placed her among his other wives, but they all complained because she was so ugly, and said she could not live with them. The king, therefore, built her a separate house for herself, where she was given food and drink the same as the other wives. Every one jeered at her on account of her ugliness; but she was not really ugly, but beautiful, as she was born with two skins, and at her birth her mother was made to promise that she should never remove the ugly skin until a certain time arrived save only during the night, and that she must put it on again before dawn. Now the king’s head wife knew this, and was very fearful lest the king should find it out and fall in love with the LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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spider’s daughter; so she went to a Ju Ju man and offered him two hundred rods to make a potion that would make the king forget altogether that the spider’s daughter was his wife. This the Ju Ju man finally consented to do, after much haggling over the price, for three hundred and fifty rods; and he made up some “medicine,” which the head wife mixed with the king’s food. For some months this had the effect of making the king forget the spider’s daughter, and he used to pass quite close to her without recognizing her in any way. When four months had elapsed and the king had not once sent for Adiaha (for that was the name of the spider’s daughter), she began to get tired, and went back to her parents. Her father, the spider, then took her to another Ju Ju man, who, by making spells and casting lots, very soon discovered that it was the king’s head wife who had made the Ju Ju and had enchanted the king so that he would not look at Adiaha. He therefore told the spider that Adiaha should give the king some medicine which he would prepare, which would make the king remember her. He prepared the medicine, for which the spider had to pay a large sum of money; and that very day Adiaha made a small dish of food, into which she had placed the medicine, and presented it to the king.

Directly he had eaten the dish his eyes were opened and he recognized his wife, and told her to come to him that very evening. So in the afternoon, being very joyful, she went down to the river and washed, and when she returned she put on her best cloth and went to the king’s palace.

Directly it was dark and all the lights were out she pulled off her ugly skin, and the king saw how beautiful she was, and was very pleased with her; but when the cock crowed Adiaha pulled on her ugly skin again, and went back to her own house.

This she did for four nights running, always taking the ugly skin off in the dark, and leaving before daylight in the morning. In course of time, to the great surprise of all the people, and particularly of the king’s two hundred wives, she gave birth to a son; but what surprised them most of all was that only one son was born, whereas her mother had always had a great many children at a time, generally about fifty.

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The king’s head wife became more jealous than ever when Adiaha had a son; so she went again to the Ju Ju man, and by giving him a large present induced him to give her some medicine which would make the king sick and forget his son. And the medicine would then make the king go to the Ju Ju man, who would tell him that it was his son who had made him sick, as he wanted to reign instead of his father. The Ju Ju man would also tell the king that if he wanted to recover he must throw his son away into the water.

And the king, when he had taken the medicine, went to the Ju Ju man, who told him everything as had been arranged with the head wife. But at first the king did not want to destroy his son. Then his chief subjects begged him to throw his son away, and said that perhaps in a year’s time he might get another son. So the king at last agreed, and threw his son into the river, at which the mother grieved and cried bitterly.

Then the head wife went again to the Ju Ju man and got more medicine, which made the king forget Adiaha for three years, during which time she was in mourning for her son. She then returned to her father, and he got some more medicine from his Ju Ju man, which Adiaha gave to the king. And the king knew her and called her to him again, and she lived with him as before. Now the Ju Ju who had helped Adiaha’s father, the spider, was a Water Ju Ju, and he was ready when the king threw his son into the water, and saved his life and took him home and kept him alive. And the boy grew up very strong.

After a time Adiaha gave birth to a daughter, and her the jealous wife also persuaded the king to throw away. It took a longer time to persuade him, but at last he agreed, and threw his daughter into the water too, and forgot Adiaha again. But the Water Ju Ju was ready again, and when he had saved the little girl, he thought the time had arrived to punish the action of the jealous wife; so he went about amongst the head young men and persuaded them to hold a wrestling match in the market-place every week. This was done, and the Water Ju Ju told the king’s son, LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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who had become very strong, and was very like to his father in appearance, that he should go and wrestle, and that no one would be able to stand up before him. It was then arranged that there should be a grand wrestling match, to which all the strongest men in the country were invited, and the king promised to attend with his head wife.

On the day of the match the Water Ju Ju told the king’s son that he need not be in the least afraid, and that his Ju Ju was so powerful, that even the strongest and best wrestlers in the country would not be able to stand up against him for even a few minutes. All the people of the country came to see the great contest, to the winner of which the king had promised to present prizes of cloth and money, and all the strongest men came. When they saw the king’s son, whom nobody knew, they laughed and said, “Who is this small boy? He can have no chance against us.” But when they came to wrestle, they very soon found that they were no match for him.

The boy was very strong indeed, beautifully made and good to look upon, and all the people were surprised to see how like he was to the king.

After wrestling for the greater part of the day the king’s son was declared the winner, having thrown every one who had stood up against him; in fact, some of his opponents had been badly hurt, and had their arms or ribs broken owing to the tremendous strength of the boy. After the match was over the king presented him with cloth and money, and invited him to dine with him in the evening. The boy gladly accepted his father’s invitation; and after he had had a good wash in the river, put on his cloth and went up to the palace, where he found the head chiefs of the country and some of the king’s most favoured wives. They then sat down to their meal, and the king had his own son, whom he did not know, sitting next to him. On the other side of the boy sat the jealous wife, who had been the cause of all the trouble. All through the dinner this woman did her best to make friends with the boy, with whom she had fallen violently in love on account of his beautiful appearance, his strength, and his being the best wrestler in the country. The woman thought to herself, “I will have this boy as my husband, as my husband is now an LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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old man and will surely soon die.” The boy, however, who was as wise as he was strong, was quite aware of everything the jealous woman had done, and although he pretended to be very flattered at the advances of the king’s head wife, he did not respond very readily, and went home as soon as he could.

When he returned to the Water Ju Ju’s house he told him everything that had happened, and the Water Ju Ju said— “As you are now in high favour with the king, you must go to him to-morrow and beg a favour from him. The favour you will ask is that all the country shall be called together, and that a certain case shall be tried, and that when the case is finished, the man or woman who is found to be in the wrong shall be killed by the Egbos before all the people.”

So the following morning the boy went to the king, who readily granted his request, and at once sent all round the country appointing a day for all the people to come in and hear the case tried. Then the boy went back to the Water Ju Ju, who told him to go to his mother and tell her who he was, and that when the day of the trial arrived, she was to take off her ugly skin and appear in all her beauty, for the time had come when she need no longer wear it. This the son did.

When the day of trial arrived, Adiaha sat in a corner of the square, and nobody recognised the beautiful stranger as the spider’s daughter. Her son then sat down next to her, and brought his sister with him. Immediately his mother saw her she said— “This must be my daughter, whom I have long mourned as dead,” and embraced her most affectionately.

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addressed the people, and said that he had called them together to hear a strong palaver at the request of the young man who had been the victor of the wrestling, and who had promised that if the case went against him he would offer up his life to the Egbo. The king also said that if, on the other hand, the case was decided in the boy’s favour, then the other party would be killed, even though it were himself or one of his wives; whoever it was would have to take his or her place on the killing-stone and have their heads cut off by the Egbos. To this all the people agreed, and said they would like to hear what the young man had to say. The young man then walked round the square, and bowed to the king and the people, and asked the question, “Am I not worthy to be the son of any chief in the country?” And all the people answered “Yes!” The boy then brought his sister out into the middle, leading her by the hand. She was a beautiful girl and well made. When every one had looked at her he said, “Is not my sister worthy to be any chief’s daughter?” And the people replied that she was worthy of being any one’s daughter, even the king’s. Then he called his mother Adiaha, and she came out, looking very beautiful with her best cloth and beads on, and all the people cheered, as they had never seen a finer woman. The boy then asked them, “Is this woman worthy of being the king’s wife?” And a shout went up from every one present that she would be a proper wife for the king, and looked as if she would be the mother of plenty of fine healthy sons.

Then the boy pointed out the jealous woman who was sitting next to the king, and told the people his story, how that his mother, who had two skins, was the spider’s daughter; how she had married the king, and how the head wife was jealous and had made a bad Ju Ju for the king, which made him forget his wife; how she had persuaded the king to throw himself and his sister into the river, which, as they all knew, had been done, but the Water Ju Ju had saved both of them, and had brought them up.

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Then the boy said: “I leave the king and all of you people to judge my case. If I have done wrong, let me be killed on the stone by the Egbos; if, on the other hand, the woman has done evil, then let the Egbos deal with her as you may decide.�

When the king knew that the wrestler was his son he was very glad, and told the Egbos to take the jealous woman away, and punish her in accordance with their laws. The Egbos decided that the woman was a witch; so they took her into the forest and tied her up to a stake, and gave her two hundred lashes with a whip made from hippopotamus hide, and then burnt her alive, so that she should not make any more trouble, and her ashes were thrown into the river. The king then embraced his wife and daughter, and told all the people that she, Adiaha, was his proper wife, and would be the queen for the future.

When the palaver was over, Adiaha was dressed in fine clothes and beads, and carried back in state to the palace by the king’s servants.

That night the king gave a big feast to all his subjects, and told them how glad he was to get back his beautiful wife whom he had never known properly before, also his son who was stronger than all men, and his fine daughter. The feast continued for a hundred and sixty-six days; and the king made a law that if any woman was found out getting medicine against her husband, she should be killed at once. Then the king built three new compounds, and placed many slaves in them, both men and women. One compound he gave to his wife, another to his son, and the third he gave to his daughter. They all lived together quite happily for some years until the king died, when his son came to the throne and ruled in his stead.

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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was anIrish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century.

Joyce is best known for Ulysses (1922), a landmark work in which the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he utilized.

Other well-known works are the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), and the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939).

His other writings include three books of poetry, a play, occasional journalism, and his published letters.

Joyce was born in 41 Brighton Square, Rathgar, Dublin—about half a mile from his mother's birthplace in Terenure—into a middle-class family on the way down.

A brilliant student, he excelled at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, despite the chaotic family life imposed by his father's alcoholism and unpredictable finances. He went on to attend University College Dublin.

In 1904, in his early twenties he emigrated permanently to continental Europe with his partner Nora Barnacle. They lived in Trieste, Paris, and Zurich. Though most of his adult life was spent abroad, Joyce's fictional universe centres on Dublin, and is populated largely by characters who closely resemble family members, enemies and friends from his time there; Ulysses in particular is set with precision in the streets and alleyways of the city. Shortly after the publication of Ulysses he elucidated this preoccupation somewhat, saying, "For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal."

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James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February 1882 to John Stanislaus Joyce and Mary Jane "May" Murray, in the Dublin suburb of Rathgar. He was baptized according to the Rites of the Catholic Church in the nearby St Joseph's Church in Terenure on 5 February by Rev. John O'Mulloy. His godparents were Philip and Ellen McCann. He was the eldest of ten surviving children; two of his siblings died of typhoid. His father's family, originally from Fermoy in Cork, had once owned a small salt and lime works. Joyce's father and paternal grandfather both married into wealthy families, though the family's purported ancestor, Se谩n M贸r Seoighe (fl. 1680) was a stonemason from Connemara. In 1887, his father was appointed rate collector (i.e., a collector of local property taxes) by Dublin Corporation; the family subsequently moved to the fashionable adjacent small town of Bray 12 miles (19 km) from Dublin. Around this time Joyce was attacked by a dog, which engendered in him a lifelong cynophobia. He also suffered from astraphobia, as a superstitious aunt had described thunderstorms to him as a sign of God's wrath.

In 1891 Joyce wrote a poem on the death of Charles Stewart Parnell. His father was angry at the treatment of Parnell by the Catholic church, the Irish Home Rule Party and the English Liberal Party and the resulting collaborative failure to secure Home Rule for Ireland. The Irish Party had dropped Parnell from leadership. But the Vatican's role in allying with the English Conservative Party to prevent Home Rule left a lasting impression on the young Joyce. The elder Joyce had the poem printed and even sent a part to the Vatican Library. In November of that same year, John Joyce was entered in Stubbs Gazette (a publisher of bankruptcies) and suspended from work. In 1893, John Joyce was dismissed with a pension, beginning the family's slide into poverty caused mainly by John's drinking and general financial mismanagement.

A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man - Poem by James Joyce Are you not weary of ardent ways, Lure of the fallen seraphim?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

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And you have had your will of him.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Above the flame the smoke of praise Goes up from ocean rim to rim.

Tell no more of enchanted days.

Our broken cries and mournful lays Rise in one eucharistic hymn.

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

While sacrificing hands upraise The chalice flowing to the brim, Tell no more of enchanted days.

And still you hold our longing gaze With languorous look and lavish limb!

Are you not weary of ardent ways?

Tell no more of enchanted days.

James Joyce

2015 FRANK O’CONNOR INTERNATIONAL SHORT STORY AWARD WINNER The Redemption of Galen Pike, by Welsh writer Carys Davies, has won this year’s Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It’s an exceptional prize with an exceptional purse: €25,000!

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The Redemption of Galen Pike and Other Stories

by Carys Davies Carys Davies is a major prizewinner in the competitive world of short story writing, having won or been shortlisted for most of the major awards in the UK. It’s easy to see why. Her originality of voice and imagination, combined with technical brilliance, make her stand out. Davies’ first collection, Some New Ambush, was a startling and confident debut. The Redemption of Galen Pike is more impressive still, the stories sparser yet also more satisfying.

As in her previous volume, this slim publication contains a multitude of worlds.

The Wales-born, Lancaster-based author takes us to different parts of the globe: rural Australia, modern-day Siberia, the valleys of south Wales. Many of the stories are historical, and many have a mythical, fairy-tale quality. Wherever we find ourselves, we are in the company of a narrator whose story intrigues us from the very beginning and whose revelations take us by surprise.

THE SUNDAY TIMES SHORT STORY AWARD; Adam Johnson Nirvana Adam is Associate Professor of English at Stanford University. A Whiting Writers Award winner, his work has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, Playboy, GQ, The New York Times and Best American Short Stories. He is the author of Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. His books have been translated into twenty-nine languages. Johnson was a 2010 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow and is a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow. His novel The Orphan Master’s Son received the 2013 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

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Nirvana: A Great Story About Love in a Time of Drones and Holograms

It's late, and I can't sleep. I raise a window for some spring Palo Alto air, but it doesn't help. In bed, eyes open, I hear whispers, which makes me think of the President because we often talk in whispers. I know the whisper sound is really just my wife, Charlotte, who listens to Nirvana on her headphones all night and tends to sleep-mumble the lyrics. Charlotte has her own bed, a mechanical one.

Yes, hearing the President whisper is creepy because he's been dead now, what— three months? But even creepier is what happens when I close my eyes: I keep visualizing my wife killing herself. More like the ways she might try to kill herself, since she's paralyzed from the shoulders down. The paralysis is quite temporary, though good luck trying to convince Charlotte of that. She slept on her side today, to fight the bedsores, and there was something about the way she stared at the safety rail at the edge of the mattress. The bed is voice-activated, so if she could somehow get her head between the bars of the safety rail, "incline" is all she'd have to say. As the bed powered up, she'd be choked in seconds. And then there's the way she stares at the looping cable that descends from the Hoyer lift, which swings her in and out of bed.

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What can really keep a guy up at night is the knowledge that she doesn't need an exotic exit strategy, not when she's exacted a promise from you to help her do it when the time comes.

I rise and go to her, but she's not listening to Nirvana yet—she tends to save it for when she needs it most, after midnight, when her nerves really start to crackle.

"I thought I heard a noise," I tell her. "Kind of a whisper."

Short, choppy hair frames her drawn face, skin faint as refrigerator light.

"I heard it, too," she says.

She spent months two, four, and seven crying pretty hard—there's no more helpless feeling for a husband, let me tell you. But this period that's come after is harder to take: Her eyes are wide, drained of emotion, and you can't tell what she's thinking. It's like she's looking at things that aren't even in the room.

In the silver dish by her voice remote is a half-smoked joint. I light it for her and hold it to her lips.

"How's the weather in there?" I ask.

"Windy," she says through the smoke.

Windy is better than hail or lightning, or, God forbid, flooding, which is the sensation she felt when her lungs were just starting to work again. But there are different kinds of wind.

I ask, "Windy like a whistle through window screens, or windy like the rattle of storm shutters?"

"A strong breeze, hissy and buffeting, like a microphone in the wind."

She smokes again. Charlotte hates being stoned, but she says it quiets the inside of her. She has Guillain-BarrĂŠ syndrome, a condition in which her immune system attacks the insulation around her nerves, so that when the brain sends signals to the body, the electrical impulses ground out before they can be received. A billion nerves inside her send signals that go everywhere, nowhere. This is the ninth month, a month that is at the edge of the medical literature. It's a place where the doctors no longer feel qualified to tell us whether Charlotte's nerves will begin to regenerate or whether Charlotte will be stuck like this forever.

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She exhales, coughing. Her right arm twitches, which means her brain has attempted to tell her arm to rise and cover the mouth.

She tokes again, and through the smoke she says, "I'm worried."

"What about?"

"You." "You're worried about me?"

"I want you to stop talking to the President. It's time to accept reality."

I try to be lighthearted. "But he's the one who talks to me."

"Then stop listening, okay? He's gone. When your time comes, you're supposed to fall silent."

Reluctantly I nod. But she doesn't understand. In the third month of paralysis, she did nothing but watch videos, which made her crazy. It made her swear off all screens, so she's probably the only person in America who didn't see the video clips of the assassination. If she'd beheld the look in the President's eyes when his life was taken, she'd understand why I talk to him late at night. If she could leave this room and feel the nation trying to grieve, she'd know why I reanimated the commander in chief and brought him back to life.

"In regards to listening to the President," I say, "I just want to point out that you spend a third of your life listening to Nirvana, whose songs are all from a guy who blew his brains out."

Charlotte tilts her head and looks at me like I'm a stranger, like I don't know the first thing about her. "Kurt Cobain took the pain of his life and made it into something that mattered, that spoke to people. Do you know how rare that is?

What did the President leave behind? Uncertainties, emptiness, a thousand rocks to overturn."

She talks like that when she's high. I decide to let it go. I tap out the joint and lift her headphones. "Ready for your Nirvana?" I ask.

"That sound, I hear it again," she says.

She tries to point, then gives up and nods toward the window.

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"It's coming from there," she says.

At the window, I look out into the darkness. It's a normal Palo Alto night—the hiss of sprinklers, blue recycling bins, a raccoon digging in the community garden.

Then I notice it, right before my eyes, a small black drone, hovering outside my window. Its tiny servos swivel to regard me. Real quick, like I'm snatching a cookie from a hot baking sheet, I steal the drone out of the air and pull it inside. I close the window and curtains, then study the thing: Its shell is made of black foil, stretched over tiny struts, like the bones of a bat's wing. Behind a propeller of clear cellophane, a tiny infrared engine throbs with warmth.

I look at Charlotte.

"Now will you listen to me?" she asks. "Now will you stop this President business?"

"It's too late for that" I tell her and release the drone. Together, we watch it bumble around the room, bouncing off the walls, running into the Hoyer lift. Is it autonomous? Has someone been operating it, someone watching our house? I lift it from its column of air and, turning it over, flip off its power switch.

Charlotte looks toward her voice remote. "Play music," she tells it.

Closing her eyes, she waits for me to place the headphones on her ears, where she will hear Kurt Cobain come to life once more.

I WAKE LATER IN THE NIGHT. The drone has somehow turned itself on and is hovering above my body, mapping me with a beam of soft red light. I toss a sweater over it, dropping it to the floor.

After making sure Charlotte's asleep, I pull out my iProjector. I turn it on and the President appears in three dimensions, his torso life-sized in an amber glow.

He greets me with a smile. "It's good to be back in Palo Alto," he says.

My algorithm has accessed the iProjector's GPS chip and searched the President's database for location references. This one came from a commencement address he gave at Stanford back when he was a senator.

"Mr. President," I say. "I'm sorry to bother you again, but I have more questions."

He looks into the distance, contemplative. "Shoot," he says.

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I move into his line of sight but can't get him to look me in the eye. That's one of the design problems I ran across. Hopefully, I'll be able to fix it in beta.

"Did I make a mistake in creating you, in releasing you into the world?" I ask. "My wife says that you're keeping people from mourning, that this you keeps us from accepting the fact that the real you is gone."

The President rubs the stubble on his chin. He looks down and away.

"You can't put the genie back in the bottle," he says.

Which is eerie, because that's a line he'd spoken on 60 Minutes, a moment when he expressed regret for legalizing drones for civilian use.

"Do you know that I'm the one who made you?"

"We are all born free," he says. "And no person may traffic in another."

"But you weren't born," I tell him. "I wrote an algorithm, based on the Linux operating kernel. You're an open-source search engine married to a dialog bot and a video compiler. The program scrubs the Web and archives a person's images and videos and data—everything you say, you've said before."

For the first time, the President falls silent.

I ask, "Do you know that you're … that you've died?"

The President doesn't hesitate.

"The end of life is another kind of freedom," he says.

The assassination flashes in my eyes. I've seen the video so many times it plays without consent—the motorcade is slowly crawling along while the President, on foot, parades past the barricaded crowds. Someone in the throng catches the President's eye. The President stops and turns, lifts a hand in greeting. Then a bullet strikes him in the abdomen. The impact bends him forward, and his eyes lift to confront the shooter, a person the camera never gets a look at. A dawning settles into the President's gaze, a look of clear recognition—of a particular person, of some kind of truth, of something he has foreseen? He takes the second shot in the face. You can see the switch go off—his limbs give and he's down. Men in suits converge, shielding him, and the clip is over. They put him on a machine for a few days, but the end had already come.

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I glance at Charlotte, asleep. Still, I whisper, "Mr. President, did you and the First Lady ever talk about the future, about these kinds of possibilities?"

I wonder if the First Lady was the one to turn off the machine.

The President smiles, "The First Lady and I have a wonderful relationship. We share everything."

"But were there instructions? Did you two make a plan?"

His voice lowers, becomes sonorous. "Are you asking about bonds of matrimony?"

I pause. "Yes." "In this regard," he says, "our only duty is to be of service, in any way we can."

My mind ponders the ways in which I might have to be of service to Charlotte.

The President then looks into the distance, like a flag is waving there.

"I'm the President of the United States," he says, "and I approved this message."

That's when I know our conversation is over. When I reach to turn off the iProjector, the President looks me squarely in the eye, a coincidence of perspective, I guess. We regard one another, his eyes deep and melancholy, and my finger hesitates at the switch.

"Seek your inner resolve," he tells me.

Can you tell a story that doesn't begin, it's just suddenly happening? The woman you love gets the flu. Her fingers tingle, her legs go rubbery. In the morning, she can't grip a coffee cup. What finally gets her to the hospital is the need to pee. She has got to pee, she's dying to pee, but the paralysis has begun: The bladder can no longer hear the brain. After an ER doc inserts a Foley catheter, you learn new words—axon, areflexia, dendrite, myelin, ascending peripheral polyneuropathy.

Charlotte says she's filled with "noise." Inside her is a "storm."

The doctor has a big needle. He tells Charlotte to get on the gurney. Charlotte's scared to get on the gurney. She's scared she won't ever get up again. "Please, honey," you say. "Get on the gurney." Soon, you behold the glycerin glow of a fresh-drawn vial of spinal fluid. And she's right. She doesn't get up again.

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To begin plasmapheresis, a femoral stent must be placed. This is performed by a tattooed phlebotomist whose headphones buzz with Rage Against the Machine.

Next comes high-dose immunoglobulin therapy.

The doctors mention, casually, the word ventilator.

Charlotte's mother arrives. She brings her cello. She's an expert on the Siege of Leningrad. She has written a book on the topic. When the coma is induced, she fills the neuro ward with the saddest sounds ever conceived. For seven days, there is nothing but the swish of vent baffles, the trill of vital monitors, and Shostakovich, Shostakovich, Shostakovich. No one will tell her to stop. Nervous nurses appear and disappear, whispering in Tagalog.

Two months of physical therapy in Santa Clara. Here are dunk tanks, sonar stimulators, exoskeletal treadmills. Charlotte is fitted for AFOs and a head array.

She becomes the person in the room who makes the victims of other afflictions feel better about their fate. She does not make progress, she's not a "soldier" or a "champ" or a "trouper."

Charlotte convinces herself that I will leave her for a woman who "works." In the rehab ward, she screams at me to get a vasectomy so this other woman and myself will suffer a barren future. My refusal becomes proof of this other woman and our plans.

To soothe her, I read aloud Joseph Heller's memoir about contracting GuillainBarré syndrome. The book was supposed to make us feel better. Instead, it chronicles how great Heller's friends are, how high Heller's spirits are, how Heller leaves his wife to marry the beautiful nurse who tends to him. And for Charlotte, the book's ending is particularly painful: Joseph Heller gets better.

We tumble into a well of despair, which is narrow and deep, a place that seals us off, where we only hear our own voices, and we exist in a fluid that's clear and black. Everything is in the well with us—careers, goals, travel, parenthood—so close that we can drown them to save ourselves.

A doctor wants to float Charlotte on a raft of antidepressants. She will take no pills.

Lightheartedly, the doctor says, "That's what IVs are for." Charlotte levels her eyes and says, "Next doctor, please."

The next doctor recommends discharge.

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Home is unexpectedly surreal. Amid familiar surroundings, the impossibility of normal life is amplified. But the cat is happy, so happy to have Charlotte home that it spends an entire night sprawled across Charlotte's throat, across her tracheal incision. Goodbye, cat! There comes, strangely, a vaudevillian week of slaphappy humor, where bedpans and withering limbs are suddenly funny, where a booger that can't be picked is hilarious, where everyday items drip with bizarre humor—I put a hat on Charlotte and we laugh and laugh. She stares in bafflement at the sight of a bra. There are lots of cat jokes!

This period passes, normal life returns. The cap to a hypodermic needle, dropped unnoticed into the sheets, irritates a hole into Charlotte's back. While I am in the garage, Charlotte watches a spider slowly descend from the ceiling on a single thread. Charlotte tries to blow it away. She blows and blows, but the spider disappears into her hair.

Still to be described are tests, tantrums, and silent treatments. To come are the discoveries of Kurt Cobain, marijuana, and ever shorter haircuts. Of these times, there is only one moment I must relate. It was a normal night. I was beside Charlotte in the mechanical bed, holding up her magazine and turning the pages, so I wasn't really facing her.

She said, "You don't know how bad I want to get out of this bed."

Her voice was quiet, uninflected. She'd said similar things a thousand times.

I flipped the page and laughed at a picture whose caption read, "Stars are just like us!"

"I'd do anything to escape," she said.

Charlotte's job was to explicate the intricate backstories of celebrities, showing me how their narratives rightfully adorned the Sistine Chapel of American culture. My job was to make fun of the celebrities and pretend that I hadn't also become caught up in their love battles and breakups.

"But I could never do that to you," she said.

"Do what?" I asked.

"Nothing."

"DID I MAKE A MISTAKE IN CREATING YOU, IN RELEASING YOU INTO THE WORLD?" I ASK. "MY WIFE SAYS THAT YOU'RE KEEPING PEOPLE LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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FROM MOURNING, THATTHIS YOU KEEPS US FROM ACCEPTING THE FACT THAT THE REAL YOU IS GONE." "What are you talking about, what's going through your head?"

I turned to look at her. She was inches away.

"Except for how it would hurt you," she said. "I would get away."

"Get away where?"

"From here."

Neither of us had spoken of the promise since the night it was exacted. I'd tried to pretend the promise didn't exist, but it existed—it existed.

"Face it, you're stuck with me," I said, forcing a smile. "We're destined, we're fated to be together. And soon you'll be better, things will be normal again."

"My entire life is this pillow."

"That's not true. You've got your friends and family. And you've got technology.

The whole world is at your fingertips."

By friends I meant her nurses and physical therapists. By family I meant her distant and brooding mother. It didn't matter: Charlotte was too disengaged to even point out her nonfunctional fingers and their nonfeeling tips.

She rolled her head to the side and stared at the safety rail.

"It's okay," she said. "I would never do that to you."

In the morning, before the nurses arrive, I open the curtains and study the drone in the early light. Most of the stealth and propulsion parts are off the shelf, but the processors are new to me, half hidden by a Kevlar shield. To get the drone to talk, to get some forensics on who sent it my way, I'll have to get my hands on the hash reader from work.

When Charlotte wakes, I prop her head and massage her legs. It's our morning routine.

"Let's generate those Schwann cells," I tell her toes. "It's time for Charlotte's body to start producing some myelin membranes."

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"Look who's Mr. Brightside," she says. "You must have been talking to the President. Isn't that why you talk to him, to get all inspired? To see the silver lining?"

I lift her right foot and rub her Achilles tendon. Last week, Charlotte failed a big test, the DTRE, which measures deep tendon response and signals the beginning of recovery. "Don't worry," the doctor told us. "I know of another patient that also took nine months to respond, and he managed a full recovery." I asked if we could contact this patient, to know what he went through, to help us see what's ahead.

The doctor informed us this patient was attended to in France, in the year 1918.

After the doctor left, I went into the garage and started making the President. A psychologist would probably say the reason I created him had to do with the promise I made Charlotte and the fact that the President also had a relationship with the person who took his life. But it's simpler than that: I just needed to save somebody, and with the President, it didn't matter that it was too late.

I tap Charlotte's patella but there's no response. "Any pain?"

"So what did the President say?"

"Which president?"

"The dead one," she says.

I articulate the plantar fascia. "How about this?"

"Feels like a spray of cool diamonds," she says. "Come on, I know you talked to him."

It's going to be one of her bad days, I can tell.

"Let me guess," Charlotte says. "The President told you to move to the South Pacific to take up painting. That's uplifting, isn't it?"

I don't say anything.

"You'd take me with you, right? I could be your assistant. I'd hold your palette in my teeth. If you need a model, I specialize in reclining nudes."

She's thirsty. We use a neti pot as a bedside water cup. Charlotte, lying down, can drink from the spout. While she sips, I say, "If you must know, the President told me to locate my inner resolve."

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"Inner resolve," she says. "I could use some help tracking down mine."

"You have more resolve than anyone I know."

"Jesus, you're sunny. Don't you know what's going on? Don't you see that I'm about to spend the rest of my life like this?"

"Pace yourself, darling. The day's only a couple minutes old."

"I know," she says. "I'm supposed to have reached a stage of enlightened acceptance or something. You think I like it that the only person I have to get mad at is you? I know it's not right—you're the one thing I love in this world."

"You love Kurt Cobain."

"He's dead."

"Too bad he's not alive for you to get mad at."

"Man, I would let him have it," she says.

We hear Hector, the morning nurse, pull up outside—he drives an old car with a combustion engine.

"I have to grab something from work," I tell her. "But I'll be back."

"Promise me something," she says.

"No." "Come on. If you do, I'll release you from the other promise."

Far from being scary, the mention of the promise is strangely relieving.

Still, I shake my head. I know she doesn't mean it—she'll never release me.

She says, "Will you please agree to be straight with me? You don't have to make me feel better, you don't have to be all fake and optimistic. It doesn't help."

"I am optimistic."

"You shouldn't be," she says. "Pretending, that's what killed Kurt Cobain."

I think it was the shotgun he pointed at his head, but I don't say that.

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I only know one line from Nirvana. I karaoke it to Charlotte: "With the lights on," I sing, "she's less dangerous."

She rolls her eyes. "You got it wrong," she says. But she smiles.

I try to encourage this. "What, I don't get points for trying?"

"You don't hear that?" Charlotte asks.

"Hear what?"

"That's the sound of me clapping."

"I give up," I say and make for the door.

"Bed, incline," Charlotte tells her remote. Her torso slowly rises. It's time to start her day.

I take the 101 Freeway south toward Mountain View, where I write code at a company called Reputation Curator. Basically the company bribes/threatens Yelpers and Facebookers to retract negative comments about dodgy lawyers and incompetent dentists. The work is labor intensive, so I was hired to write a program that would sweep the Web to construct client profiles. Creating the President was only a step away.

In the vehicle next to me is a woman with her iProjector on the passenger seat, and she's having an animated discussion with the President as she drives. At the next overpass, I see an older black man in a tan jacket, looking down at the traffic.

Standing next to him is the President. They're not speaking, just standing together, silently watching the cars go by.

A black car, driverless, begins pacing me in the next lane. When I speed up, it speeds up. Through its smoked windows, I can see it has no cargo—there's nothing inside but a battery array big enough to ensure no car could outrun it. Even though I like driving, even though it relaxes me, I shift to automatic and dart into the Google lane, where I let go of the wheel and sign on to the Web for the first time since I released the President a week ago. I log in and discover that fourteen million people have downloaded the President. I also have seven hundred new messages. The first is from the dude who started Facebook, and it is not spam—he wants to buy me a burrito and talk about the future. I skip to the latest message, which is from Charlotte: "I don't mean to be mean. I lost my feeling, remember?

I'll get it back. I'm trying, really, I am."

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I see the President again, on the lawn of a Korean church. The minister has placed an iProjector on a chair, and the President appears to be engaging a Bible that's been propped before him on a stand. I understand that he is a ghost that will haunt us until our nation comes to grips with what has happened: that he is gone, that he has been stolen from us, that it is irreversible. And I'm not an idiot. I know what's really being stolen from me, slowly and irrevocably, before my eyes. I know that late at night I should be going to Charlotte instead of the President.

But when I'm with Charlotte, there's a membrane between us, a layer my mind places there to protect me from the tremor in her voice, from the pulse visible in her desiccated wrists, from all the fates she sarcastically paints. It's when I'm away from her that it comes crashing in—it's in the garage that it hits me how scared she is, it's at the store when I cross tampons off the list that I consider how cruel life must seem to her. Driving now, I think about how she has started turning toward the wall even before the last song on the Nirvana album is over, that soon, even headphones and marijuana will cease to work. My off-ramp up ahead is blurry, and I realize there are tears in my eyes. I drive right past my exit. I just let the Google lane carry me away.

When I arrive home, my boss, Sanjay, is waiting for me. I'd messaged him to have an intern deliver the hash reader, but here is the man himself, item in hand.

Theoretically, hash readers are impossible. Theoretically, you shouldn't be able to crack full-field, hundred-key encryption. But some guy in India did it, some guy Sanjay knows. Sanjay's sensitive about being from India, and he thinks it's a clichÊ that a guy with his name runs a start-up in Palo Alto. So he goes by "SJ" and dresses all D school. He's got a Stanford MBA, but he basically just stole the business model of a company called Reputation Defender. You can't blame the guy—he's one of those types with the hopes and dreams of an entire village riding on him.

SJ follows me into the garage, where I dock the drone and use some slave code to parse its drive. He hands me the hash reader, hand-soldered in Bangalore from an old motherboard. We marvel at it, the most sophisticated piece of cryptography on earth, here in our unworthy hands. But if you want to "curate" the reputations of Silicon Valley, you better be ready to crack some codes.

He's quiet while I initialize the drone and run a diagnostic.

"Long time no see," he finally says.

"I needed some time," I tell him.

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"Understood," SJ says. "We've missed you is all I'm saying. You bring the President back to life, send fifteen million people to our Web site, and then we don't see you for a week."

The drone knows something is suspicious—it powers off. I force a reboot.

"Got yourself a drone there?" SJ asks.

"It's a rescue," I say. "I'm adopting it."

SJ nods. "Thought you should know the Secret Service came by."

"Looking for me?" I ask. "Doesn't sound so secret."

"They must have been impressed with your President. I know I was."

SJ has long lashes and big, manga brown eyes. He hits me with them now.

"I've gotta tell you," he says. "The President is a work of art, a seamlessly integrated data interface. I'm in real admiration. This is a game-changer. You know what I envision?"

I notice his flashy glasses. "Are those Android?" I ask.

"Yeah."

"Can I have them?"

He hands them over, and I search the frames for their IP address.

SJ gestures large. "I envision your algorithm running on Reputation Curator.

Average people could bring their personalities to life, to speak for themselves, to customize and personalize how they're seen by the world. Your program is like Google, Wikipedia, and Facebook, all in one. Everyone with a reputation on the planet would pay to have you animate them, to make them articulate, vigilant … eternal."

"You can have it," I tell SJ. "The algorithm's core is open source—I used a freeware protocol."

SJ flashes a brittle smile. "We've actually looked into that," he says, "and, well, it seems like you coded it with seven-layer encryption."

"Yeah, I guess I did, didn't I? You're the one with the hash reader. Just crack it."

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"I don't want it to be like that," SJ says. "Let's be partners. Your concept is brilliant—an algorithm that scrubs the Web and compiles the results into a personal animation. The President is the proof, but it's also given away the idea. If we move now, we can protect it, it will be ours. In a few weeks, though, everyone will have their own."

I don't point out the irony of SJ wanting to protect a business model.

"Is the President just an animation to you?" I ask. "Have you spoken with him?

Have you listened to what he has to say?"

"I'm offering stock," SJ says. "Wheelbarrows of it."

The drone offers up its firewall like a seductress her throat. I deploy the hash reader, whose processer hums and flashes red. We sit on folding chairs while it works.

"I need your opinion," I tell him.

"Right on," he says and removes a bag of weed. He starts rolling a joint, then passes me the rest. He's been hooking me up the last couple months, no questions.

"What do you think of Kurt Cobain?" I ask.

"Kurt Cobain," he repeats as he works the paper between his fingers. "The man was pure," he says and licks the edge. "Too pure for this world. Have you heard Patti Smith's cover of 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'? Unassailable, man."

He lights the joint and passes it my way, but I wave it off. He sits there, staring out the open mouth of my garage into the Kirkland plumage of Palo Alto. Apple, Oracle, PayPal, and Hewlett-Packard were all started in garages within a mile of here. About once a month, SJ gets homesick and cooks litti chokha for everyone at work. He plays Sharda Sinha songs and gets this look in his eyes like he's back in Bihar, land of peepul trees and roller birds. He has this look now. He says, "You know my family downloaded the President. They have no idea what I do out here, as if I could make them understand that I help bad sushi chefs ward off Twitter trolls. But the American President, that they understand."

The mayor, barefoot, jogs past us. Moments later, a billboard drives by.

"Hey, can you make the President speak Hindi?" SJ asks. "If you could get the American President to say, 'I could go for a Pepsi' in Hindi, I'd make you the richest man on earth."

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The hash reader's light turns green. Just like that, the drone is mine. I disconnect the leads and begin to synch the Android glasses. The drone uses its moment of freedom to rise and study SJ. SJ returns the drone's intense scrutiny.

"Who do you think sent it after you?" he asks. "Mozilla? Craigslist?"

"We'll know in a moment."

"Silent. Black. Radar deflecting," SJ says. "I bet this is Microsoft's dark magic."

The new OS suddenly initiates, the drone responds, and, using retinal commands, I send it on a lap around the garage. "Lo and behold," I say. "Turns out our little friend speaks Google."

"Wow," SJ says. "Don't be evil, huh?"

MORE FROM ESQUIRE When the drone returns, it targets SJ in the temple with a green laser.

"What the fuck," SJ says.

"Don't worry," I tell him. "It's just taking your pulse and temperature."

"What for?"

"Probably trying to read your emotions," I say. "I bet it's a leftover subroutine."

"You sure you're in charge of that thing?"

I roll my eyes and the drone does a back flip.

"My emotion is simple," SJ tells me. "It's time to come back to work."

"I will," I tell him. "I've just got some things to deal with."

SJ looks at me. "It's okay if you don't want to talk about your wife. But you don't have to be so alone about things. Everyone at work, we're all worried about you."

Inside, Charlotte is suspended in a sling from the Hoyer Lift, which has been rolled to the window so she can see outside. She's wearing old yoga tights, which

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are slack on her, and she smells of the cedar oil her massage therapist rubs her with. I go to her and open the window.

"You read my mind," she says and breathes the fresh air.

I put the glasses on her, and it takes her eyes a minute of flashing around before the drone lifts from my hands. A grand smile crosses her face as she puts it through its paces—hovering, rotating, swiveling the camera's servos. And then the drone is off. I watch it cross the lawn, veer around the compost piles, and then head for the community garden. It floats down the rows, and though I don't have the view Charlotte does in her glasses, I can see the drone inspecting the blossoms of summer squash, the fat bottoms of Roma tomatoes. It rises along the bean trellises and tracks watermelons by their umbilical stems. When she makes it to her plot, she gasps.

"My roses," she says. "They're still there. Someone's been taking care of them."

She has the drone inspect every bud and bloom. Carefully, she maneuvers it through the bright petals, brushing against the blossoms, then shuttles it home again. Suddenly it is hovering before us. Charlotte leans slightly forward and sniffs the drone deeply. "I never thought I'd smell my roses again," she says, her face flush with hope and amazement, and suddenly the tears are streaming.

I remove her glasses, and we leave the drone hovering there.

She regards me. "I want to have a baby," she says.

"A baby?"

"It's been nine months. I could have had one already. I could've been doing something useful this whole time."

"But your illness," I say. "We don't know what's ahead."

She closes her eyes like she's hugging something, like she's holding some dear truth.

"With a baby, I'd have something to show for all this. I'd have a reason. At the least, I'd have something to leave behind."

"You can't talk like that," I tell her. "We've talked about you not talking like this."

But she won't listen to me, she won't open her eyes.

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All she says is "And I want to start tonight."

Later in the day, I carry the iProjector out back to the gardening shed. Here, in the gold of afternoon light, the President rises and comes to life. He adjusts his collar, cuffs, runs his thumb down a black lapel as if he exists only in the moment before a camera will broadcast him live to the world.

"Mr. President," I say. "I'm sorry to bother you again."

"Nonsense," he tells me. "I serve at the pleasure of the people."

"Do you remember me?" I ask. "Do you remember the problems I've been talking to you about?"

"Perennial is the nature of the problems that plague man. Particular is the voice with which they call to each of us."

"My problem today is of a personal nature."

"Then I place this conversation under the seal."

"I haven't made love to my wife in a long time." He holds up a hand to halt me. He smiles in a knowing, fatherly way.

"Times of doubt," he tells me, "are inherent in the compact of civil union."

"My question is about children."

"Children are the future," he tells me.

"Would you have still brought yours into the world, knowing that only one of you might be around to raise them?"

"Single parenting places too much of a strain on today's families," he says. "That's why I'm introducing legislation that will reduce the burden on our hardworking parents."

"What about your children? Do you miss them?"

"My mind goes to them constantly. Being away from them is the great sacrifice of the office."

In the shed, suspended dust makes his specter glitter and swirl. It makes him look like he is cutting out, like he will leave at any moment. I feel some urgency.

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"When it's all finally over," I ask, "where is it that we go?"

"I'm no preacher," the President says, "but I believe we go where we are called."

"Where were you called to? Where is it that you are?"

"Don't we all try to locate ourselves among the pillars of uncommon knowledge?"

"You don't know where you are, do you?" I ask the President.

"I'm sure my opponent would like you to believe that."

"It's okay," I say, more to myself. "I didn't expect you to know."

"I know exactly where I am," the President says. Then, in a voice that sounds pieced from many scraps, he adds, "I'm currently positioned at three seven point four four north by one two two point one four west."

I think he's done. I wait for him to say Good night and God bless America. Instead, he reaches out to touch my chest. "I have heard that you have made much personal sacrifice," he says. "And I'm told that your sense of duty is strong."

I don't think I agree, but I say, "Yes sir."

His glowing hand clasps my shoulder, and it doesn't matter that I can't feel it.

"Then this medal that I affix to your uniform is much more than a piece of silver. It is a symbol of how much you have given, not just in armed struggle and not just in service to your nation. It tells others how much more you have to give. It marks you forever as one who can be counted upon, as one who in times of need will lift up and carry those who have fallen." Proudly, he stares into the empty space above my shoulder. He says, "Now return home to your wife, soldier, and start a new chapter of life."

When darkness falls, I go to Charlotte. The night nurse has placed her in a negligee. Charlotte lowers the bed as I approach. The electric motor is the only sound in the room.

"I'm ovulating," she announces. "I can feel it."

"You can feel it?"

"I don't need to feel it," she says. "I just know."

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She's strangely calm.

"Are you ready?" she asks.

"Sure."

I steady myself on the safety rail that separates us.

She asks, "Do you want some oral sex first?"

I shake my head.

"Come join me, then," she says.

I start to climb on the bed—she stops me.

"Hey, Sunshine," she says. "Take off your clothes."

I can't remember the last time she called me that.

"Oh, yeah," I say and unbutton my shirt, unzip my jeans. When I drop my underwear, I feel weirdly, I don't know, naked. I'm not sure whether I should remove my socks. I leave them on. I swing a leg up, then kind of lie on her.

A look of contentment crosses her face. "This is how it's supposed to be," she says.

"It's been a long time since I've been able to look into your eyes."

Her body is narrow but warm. I don't know where to put my hands.

"Do you want to pull down my panties?"

I sit up and begin to work them off. I see the scar from the femoral stent. When I heft her legs, there are the bedsores we've been fighting.

"Remember our trip to Mexico," she asks, "when we made love on top of that pyramid? It was like we were in the past and the future at the same time. I kind of feel that now."

"You're not high, are you?"

"What?" she asks. "Like I'd have to be stoned to remember the first time we talked about having a baby?"

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When I have her panties off and her legs hooked, I pause. It takes all my focus to get an erection, and then I can't believe I have one. I see the moment coldly, distant, the way a drone would see it: Here's my wife, paralyzed, invalid, insensate, and though everything's the opposite of erotic, I am poised above her, completely hard.

"I'm wet, aren't I?" Charlotte asks. "I've been thinking about this all day."

I do remember the pyramid. The stone was cold, the staircase steep. The past to me was a week of Charlotte in Mayan dresses, cooing every baby she came across.

Having sex under faint and sleepy stars, I tried to imagine the future: a faceless someoneconceived on a sacrificial altar. I finished early and tried to shake it off. That person would probably never come to be. Plus, we had to focus on matters at hand if we were going to make it down all those steps in the dark.

"I think I feel something," she says. "You're inside me, right? Because I'm pretty sure I can feel it."

Here I enter my wife and begin our lovemaking. I try to focus on the notion that if this works, Charlotte will be safe, that for nine months she'd let no harm come to her, and maybe she's right, maybe the baby will stimulate something and recovery will begin.

Charlotte smiles. It's brittle, but it's a smile. "How's this for finding the silver lining—I won't have to feel the pain of childbirth."

This makes me wonder if a paralyzed woman can push out a baby, or does she get the scalpel, and if so, is there anesthesia, and suddenly my body is at the edge of not cooperating.

"Hey, are you here?" she asks. "I'm trying to get you to smile."

"I just need to focus for a minute," I tell her.

"I can tell you're not really into this," she says. "I can tell you're still hung up on the idea I'm going to do something drastic to myself, right? Just because I talk about crazy stuff sometimes doesn't mean I'm going to do anything."

"Then why'd you make me promise to help you do it?"

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The promise came early, in the beginning, just before the ventilator. She had a vomiting reflex that lasted for hours. The doctors said it can happen. Imagine endless dry heaves while you're paralyzed. The doctors finally gave her narcotics.

Drugged, dead-limbed, and vomiting, that's when it hit her that she was no longer in control. I was holding her hair, keeping it out of the basin. She was panting between heaves.

She said, "Promise me that when I tell you to make it stop, you'll make it stop."

"Make what stop?" I asked.

She retched, long and cord-rattling. I knew what she meant.

"It won't come to that," I said.

She tried to say something but retched again.

"I promise," I said.

Now, in her mechanical bed, her negligee straps slipping off her shoulders, Charlotte says, "It's hard for you to understand, I know. But the idea that there's a way out, it's what allows me to keep going. I'd never take it. You believe me, don't you?"

"I hate that promise, I hate that you made me make it."?

"I'd never do it, and I'd never make you help."

"Then release me," I tell her.

"I'm sorry," she says.

I decide to just shut it all out and keep going. I'm losing my erection, and my mind wonders what will happen if I go soft—do I have it in me to fake it?—but I shut it out and keep going and going, pounding on Charlotte until I can barely feel anything. Her breasts loll alone under me. From the bedside table, the drone turns itself on and rises, hovering. It flashes my forehead with its green laser, as if what I'm feeling is that easy to determine, as if there would be a name for it. Is it spying on me, mining my emotions, or executing old code? I wonder if the hash reader failed or if the drone's OS reverted to a previous version or if Google reacquired it or if it's in some kind of autonomous mode. Or it could be that someone hacked the Android glasses, or maybe ‌ that's when I look down and see Charlotte is crying.

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I stop.

"No, don't," she says. "Keep going."

She's not crying hard, but they are fat, lamenting tears.

"We can try again tomorrow," I tell her.

"No, I'm okay," she says. "Just keep going and do something for me, would you?"

"All right."

"Put the headphones on me."

"You mean, while we're doing it?"

"Music on," she says, and from the headphones on her bedside table, I hear Nirvana start to hum.

"I know I'm doing it all wrong," I say. "It's been a long time, and ‌" "It's not you," she says. "I just need my music. Just put them on me."

"Why do you need Nirvana? What is it to you?"

She closes her eyes and shakes her head.

"What is it with this Kurt Cobain?" I say. "What's your deal with him?"

I grab her wrists and pin them down, but she can't feel it.

"Why do you have to have this music? What's wrong with you?" I demand. "Just tell me what it is that's wrong with you."

I go to the garage, where the drone wanders lost along the walls, looking for a way out. I turn on a computer and search online until I find one of these Nirvana albums. I play the whole thing, just sitting there in the dark. The guy, this Kurt Cobain, sings about being stupid and dumb and unwanted. In one song he says that Jesus doesn't want him for a sunbeam. In another song, he says he wants milk and laxatives along with cherry-flavored antacids. He has a song called "All Apologies," where he keeps singing, "What else can I be? All apologies." But he never actually apologizes. He doesn't even say what he did wrong.

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The drone, having found no escape, comes to me and hovers silently. I must look pretty pathetic because the drone takes my temperature.

I lift the remote for the garage-door opener. "Is this what you want?" I ask. "Are you going to come back, or am I going to have to come find you?"

The drone silently hums, impassive atop its column of warm air.

I press the button. The drone waits until the garage door is all the way up. Then it snaps a photograph of me and zooms off into the Palo Alto night.

I stand and breathe the air, which is cool and smells of flowers. There's enough moonlight to cast leaf patterns on the driveway. Down the street, I spot the glowing eyes of our cat. I call his name but he doesn't come. I gave him to a friend a couple blocks away, and for a few weeks the cat returned at night to visit me. Not anymore. This feeling of being in proximity to something that's lost to you, it seems like my whole life right now. It's a feeling Charlotte would understand if she'd just talk to the President. But he's not the one she needs to speak to, I suddenly understand. I return to my computer bench and fire up a bank of screens.

I stare into their blue glow and get to work. It takes me hours, most of the night, before I'm done.

It's almost dawn when I go to Charlotte. The room is dark, and I can only see her outline. "Bed incline," I say, and she starts to rise. She wakes and stares at me but says nothing. Her face has that lack of expression that comes only after it's been through every emotion.

I set the iProjector in her lap. She hates the thing but says nothing. She only tilts her head a little, like she's sad for me. Then I turn it on.

Kurt Cobain appears before her, clad in a bathrobe and composed of soft blue light.

Charlotte inhales. "Oh my God," she murmurs.

She looks at me. "Is it him?"

I nod.

She marvels at him.

"What do I say?" she asks. "Can he talk?"

I don't answer.

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Kurt Cobain's hair is in his face. Shifting her gaze, Charlotte tries to look into his eyes. While the President couldn't quite manage to find your eyes, Kurt is purposefully avoiding them.

"I can't believe how young you are," Charlotte tells him. "You're just a boy."

Kurt's silent, then he mumbles, "I'm old."

"Are you really here?" she asks.

"Here we are now," he sings. "Entertain us."

His voice is rough and hard lived. It's some kind of proof of life to Charlotte.

Charlotte looks at me, filled with wonder. "I thought he was gone," she says. "I can't believe he's really here."

Kurt shrugs. "I only appreciate things when they're gone," he says.

Charlotte looks stricken.

"I recognize that line," she says to me. "That's a line from his suicide note. How does he know that? Has he already written it, does he know what he's going to do?"

"I don't know," I tell her. This isn't my conversation to have. I back away toward the door, and just as I'm leaving, I hear her start to talk to him.

"Don't do what you're thinking about doing," she pleads with him. "You don't know how special you are, you don't know how much you matter to me. Please don't take yourself from me," she says carefully, like she's talking to a child. "You can't take yourself from me."

She leans toward Kurt Cobain, like she wants to throw her arms around him and hold him, like she's forgotten that her arms don't work and there's no him to embrace.

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Namwali Serpell wins sixteenth Caine Prize for African Writing Zambia’s Namwali Serpell has won the 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled “The Sack” from Africa39 (Bloomsbury, London, 2014).

The Chair of Judges, Zoë Wicomb, announced Namwali Serpell as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held this evening (Monday, 6 July) at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

“The Sack” explores a world where dreams and reality are both claustrophobic and dark. The relationship between two men and an absent woman are explored though troubled interactions and power relationships which jar with the views held by the characters.

Zoë Wicomb praised the story, saying, “From a very strong shortlist we have picked an extraordinary story about the aftermath of revolution with its liberatory promises shattered. It makes demands on the reader and challenges conventions of the genre. It yields fresh meaning with every reading. Formally innovative, stylistically stunning, haunting and enigmatic in its effects. ‘The Sack’ is a truly luminous winner of the Caine Prize for African Writing.”

Namwali Serpell’s first published story, “Muzungu,” was selected for the Best American Short Stories 2009 and shortlisted for the 2010 Caine Prize for African Writing. In 2014, she was selected as one of the most promising African writers for the Africa 39 Anthology, a project of the Hay festival. Her writing has appeared in Tin House, The Believer, n+1, McSweeney’s (forthcoming), Bidoun, Callaloo, The San Francisco Chronicle, The L.A. Review of Books, and The Guardian. She is an associate professor in the University of California, Berkeley English department; her first book of literary criticism, Seven Modes of Uncertainty, was published in 2014.

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Playing in the light by zoe wicomb

Set in a beautifully rendered 1990s Cape Town, ZoĂŤ Wicomb's celebrated novel revolves around Marion Campbell, who runs a travel agency but hates traveling, and who, in post-apartheid society, must negotiate the complexities of a knotty relationship with Brenda, her first black employee. As Alison McCulloch noted in the New York Times, "Wicomb deftly explores the ghastly soup of racism in all its unglory--denial, tradition, habit, stupidity, fear--and manages to do so without moralizing or becoming formulaic."

Caught in the narrow world of private interests and self-advancement, Marion eschews national politics until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission throws up information that brings into question not only her family's past but her identity and her rightful place in contemporary South African society. "Stylistically nuanced and psychologically astute" (Kirkus), Playing in the Lightis as powerful in its depiction of Marion's personal journey as it is in its depiction of South Africa's bizarre, brutal history.

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You may do it practically every day, but do you really know how to wash your hair the right way? Using the correct techniques can make a world of difference in your hair’s health, bounce and shine — but if you’re making some common mistakes, you could be damaging your strands without even knowing it.

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1. Start with a rinse.

Just like your laundry needs a rinse cycle before you add detergent, hair should be thoroughly wet before you add your shampoo. “Hot water will open the cuticle, which is good for removing any dirt or product trapped in the hair,” says White.

Another bonus: “When your hair is rinsed in warm water, it loosens the oils through the scalp and opens the cuticle so it is able to absorb the oil” in your conditioner, says Saviano.

2. If you have long hair, condition first.

Yes, really! “If you have hair beneath the shoulders, protect fragile ends from drying out and further damage by running a small amount of conditioner through them and lightly rinsing, before any shampooing. This will not only keep ends healthy, it will fill any holes in the cuticle with moisture, making it smoother and boosting shine,” says White.

3. Lather up — but only at the scalp.

“You only need to shampoo the hair at the scalp, particularly at the nape,” Saviano says.

White agrees. “The best way to lather up is from roots to ends. The hair closest to the scalp is the youngest and will inevitably be the oiliest, while the end of the hair is the oldest and usually driest, most fragile part of the hair.”

Don’t use more shampoo than you need; both Saviano and White say that a quarter-sized amount of shampoo is enough. If your hair is particularly long or thick, go ahead and double that.

4. Be gentle!

Friction can permanently damage your hair’s cuticle, leading to breakage and frizz.

Think about washing your hair like you hand wash your delicates — very carefully.

“Start your lather at the roots,” says White. “Increase blood flow to the scalp and stimulate hair growth by using vertical strokes with medium pressure.” Don’t use circular motions, which can tangle your hair.

Next, “Smooth the lather over the ends in a straight stroking motion,” White advises. “Do not scrub the fragile ends or use a back and forth motion like you’re washing a rag on a washboard.”

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5. Don’t rinse and repeat.

Despite what the instructions on the back of your shampoo bottle may say, there’s no need to wash your hair twice. “Avoid stripping the hair by doing one shampoo only, which is usually sufficient,” says White. “Unless the hair is extremely dirty and the first shampoo didn’t produce a lather,” in which case, go ahead and lather up one more time.

6. Add conditioner from the mid-lengths to the tips.

After you’ve rinsed out your shampoo, “squeeze some of the water out of the hair before you put in the conditioner,” says Saviano. “Then clip your hair up and finish showering, leaving the conditioner rinse out for the final step of your shower.” The longer the conditioner stays on your hair, the better it absorbs. Don’t put conditioner at the roots of your hair; the natural oil from your scalp is more concentrated there.

7. Finish with a cold water rinse.

“Cold water will shut the cuticle tight, sealing the shingle-like outer layer, which will cause it to reflect the most light and give off the most shine,” says White.

More Hair Washing Tips Use a shampoo and conditioner that’s made for your hair type. If your hair is dry, choose moisturizing products. If you color your hair, opt for color-safe formulas. “Volumizing” shampoos tend to leave hair drier, so they’re best for fine hair types that would be weighed down by more moisturizing products.

How often you wash your hair depends on your hair type, too. If you have oily or fine hair, you may need to shampoo daily. Normal or dry hair can lather up closer to three times a week.

Filter your water. White recommends using a shower filter, such as the T3 Source Showerhead, since it “removes rust and minerals from water that can dull color, and deposit on blondes making them dark and muddy.” (We’ve tried it, and it also made our hair super soft.)

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Healthy eating is not about strict dietary limitations, staying unrealistically thin, or depriving yourself of the foods you love. Rather, it’s about feeling great, having more energy, improving your outlook, and stabilizing your mood. If you feel overwhelmed by all the conflicting nutrition and diet advice out there, you’re not alone. It seems that for every expert who tells you a certain food is good for you, you’ll find another saying exactly the opposite. But by using these simple tips, you can cut through the confusion and learn how to create a tasty, varied, and healthy diet that is as good for your mind as it is for your body.

How does healthy eating affect mental and emotional health?

We all know that eating right can help you maintain a healthy weight and avoid certain health problems, but your diet can also have a profound effect on your mood and sense of wellbeing. Studies have linked eating a typical Western diet— filled with red and processed meats, packaged meals, takeout food, and sugary snacks—with higher rates of depression, stress, bipolar disorder, and anxiety.

Eating an unhealthy diet may even play a role in the development of mental health disorders such as ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, and schizophrenia, or in the increased risk of suicide in young people.

Eating more fruits and vegetables, cooking meals at home, and reducing your fat and sugar intake, on the other hand, may help to improve mood and lower your risk for mental health problems. If you have already been diagnosed with a mental health problem, eating well can even help to manage your symptoms and regain control of your life.

While some specific foods or nutrients have been shown to have a beneficial effect on mood, it’s your overall dietary pattern that is most important. That means switching to a healthy diet doesn’t have to be an all or nothing proposition. You don’t have to be perfect and you don’t have to completely eliminate foods you enjoy to have a healthy diet and make a difference to the way you think and feel.

Healthy eating tip 1: Set yourself up for success

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To set yourself up for success, think about planning a healthy diet as a number of small, manageable steps—like adding a salad to your diet once a day—rather than one big drastic change. As your small changes become habit, you can continue to add more healthy choices. 

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Prepare more of your own meals. Cooking more meals at home can help you take charge of what you’re eating and better monitor exactly what goes into your food.

Make the right changes. When cutting back on unhealthy foods in your diet, it’s important to replace them with healthy alternatives. Replacing animal fats with vegetables fats (such as switching butter for olive oil) will make a positive difference to your health. Switching animal fats for refined carbohydrates, though (such as switching your breakfast bacon for a donut), won’t lower your risk for heart disease or improve your mood.

Simplify. Instead of being overly concerned with counting calories, think of your diet in terms of color, variety, and freshness. Focus on avoiding packaged and processed foods and opting for more fresh ingredients.

Read the labels. It’s important to be aware of what’s in your food as manufacturers often hide large amounts of sugar and salt in packaged food, even food claiming to be healthy.

Focus on how you feel after eating. This will help foster healthy new habits and tastes. The more healthy food you eat, the better you’ll feel after a meal. The more junk food you eat, the more likely you are to feel uncomfortable, nauseous, or drained of energy.

Drink plenty of water. Water helps flush our systems of waste products and toxins, yet many people go through life dehydrated—causing tiredness, low energy, and headaches. It’s common to mistake thirst for hunger, so staying well hydrated will also help you make healthier food choices.

Healthy eating tip 2: Moderation is key

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Key to any healthy diet is moderation. But what is moderation? In essence, it means eating only as much food as your body needs. You should feel satisfied at the end of a meal, but not stuffed. Moderation is also about balance. Despite what fad diets would have you believe, we all need a balance of carbohydrates, protein, fat, fiber, vitamins, and minerals to sustain a healthy body.

For most of us, moderation also means eating less than we do now. But it doesn't mean eliminating the foods you love. Eating bacon for breakfast once a week, for example, could be considered moderation if you follow it with a healthy lunch and dinner—but not if you follow it with a box of donuts and a sausage pizza. If you eat 100 calories of chocolate one afternoon, balance it out by deducting 100 calories from your evening meal. If you're still hungry, fill up with extra vegetables. 

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Try not to think of certain foods as “off-limits.” When you ban certain foods or food groups, it is natural to want those foods more, and then feel like a failure if you give in to temptation. Start by reducing portion sizes of unhealthy foods and not eating them as often. As you reduce your intake of unhealthy foods, you may find yourself craving them less or thinking of them as only occasional indulgences.

Think smaller portions. Serving sizes have ballooned recently. When dining out, choose a starter instead of an entree, split a dish with a friend, and don't order supersized anything. At home, visual cues can help with portion sizes–your serving of meat, fish, or chicken should be the size of a deck of cards and half a cup of mashed potato, rice, or pasta is about the size of a traditional light bulb. If you don't feel satisfied at the end of a meal, add more leafy green vegetables or round off the meal with fruit.

Take your time. Stop eating before you feel full. It actually takes a few minutes for your brain to tell your body that it has had enough food, so eat slowly.

Eat with others whenever possible. As well as the emotional benefits, this allows you to model healthy eating habits for your kids. Eating in front of the TV or computer often leads to mindless overeating.

It's not just what you eat, but when you eat 

Eat breakfast, and eat smaller meals throughout the day. A healthy breakfast can jumpstart your metabolism, while eating small, healthy meals (rather than the standard three large meals) keeps your energy up.

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Avoid eating at night. Try to eat dinner earlier and fast for 14-16 hours until breakfast the next morning. Studies suggest that eating only when you’re most active and giving your digestive system a long break each day may help to regulate weight.

Healthy eating tip 3: Fill up on colorful fruits and vegetables Fruits and vegetables are low in calories and nutrient dense, which means they are packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fiber. Focus on eating the recommended daily minimum of five servings of fruit and vegetables and it will naturally fill you up and help you cut back on unhealthy foods. A serving is half a cup of raw fruit or veg or a small apple or banana, for example. Most of us need to double the amount we currently eat.

Try to eat a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day as deeply colored fruits and vegetables contain higher concentrations of vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.

Add berries to breakfast cereals, eat fruit for dessert, and snack on vegetables such as carrots, snow peas, or cherry tomatoes instead of processed snack foods. 

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Greens. Branch out beyond lettuce. Kale, mustard greens, broccoli, and Chinese cabbage are all packed with calcium, magnesium, iron, potassium, zinc, and vitamins A, C, E, and K. Sweet vegetables. Naturally sweet vegetables—such as corn, carrots, beets, sweet potatoes, yams, onions, and squash—add healthy sweetness to your meals and reduce your cravings for added sugars.

Fruit. Fruit is a tasty, satisfying way to fill up on fiber, vitamins, and antioxidants. Berries are cancer-fighting, apples provide fiber, oranges and mangos offer vitamin C, and so on.

Healthy eating tip 4: Eat more healthy carbs and whole grains Choose healthy carbohydrates and fiber sources, especially whole grains, for longlasting energy. Whole grains are rich in phytochemicals and antioxidants, which help to protect against coronary heart disease, certain cancers, and diabetes.

What are healthy carbs and unhealthy carbs?

Healthy carbs (or good carbs) include whole grains, beans, fruits, and vegetables.

Healthy carbs are digested slowly, helping you feel full longer and keeping blood sugar and insulin levels stable.

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Unhealthy carbs (or bad carbs) are foods such as white flour, refined sugar, and white rice that have been stripped of all bran, fiber, and nutrients. They digest quickly and cause spikes in blood sugar levels and energy.

Tips for eating more healthy carbs

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Include a variety of whole grains in your healthy diet, including whole wheat, brown rice, millet, quinoa, and barley.

Make sure you're really getting whole grains. Check for the Whole Grain Stamps that distinguish between partial whole grain and 100% whole grain.

Try mixing grains as a first step to switching to whole grains. If whole grains like brown rice and whole wheat pasta don’t sound good at first, start by mixing what you normally use with the whole grains. You can gradually increase the whole grain to 100%.

Avoid: Refined foods such as breads, pastas, and breakfast cereals that are not whole grain.

Healthy eating tip 5: Enjoy healthy fats and avoid unhealthy fats Good sources of healthy fat are needed to nourish your brain, heart, and cells, as well as your hair, skin, and nails. Foods rich in certain omega-3 fats can reduce cardiovascular disease, improve your mood, and help prevent dementia.

Add to your healthy diet: 

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Monounsaturated fats, from plant oils like canola oil, peanut oil, and olive oil, as well as avocados, nuts (like almonds, hazelnuts, and pecans), and seeds (such as pumpkin, sesame).

Polyunsaturated fats, including Omega-3 and Omega-6 fatty acids, found in fatty fish such as salmon, herring, mackerel, anchovies, sardines, and some cold water fish oil supplements. Other sources of polyunsaturated fats are unheated sunflower, corn, soybean, flaxseed oils, and walnuts.

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Reduce from your diet:  

Saturated fats, found primarily in animal sources including red meat and whole milk dairy products.

Trans fats, found in vegetable shortenings, some margarines, crackers, candies, cookies, snack foods, fried foods, baked goods, and other processed foods made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

For more, see Choosing Healthy Fats.

Healthy eating tip 6: Reduce sugar and salt As well as creating weight problems, too much sugar causes energy spikes and has been linked to diabetes, depression, and even an increase in suicidal behaviors in young people. Reducing the amount of candy and desserts you eat is only part of the solution as sugar is also hidden in foods such as bread, cereals, canned soups and vegetables, pasta sauce, margarine, instant mashed potatoes, frozen dinners, low-fat meals, fast food, and ketchup. It all adds up to a lot of empty calories since your body gets all it needs from sugar naturally occurring in food.

Sodium is another ingredient that is frequently added to food to improve taste, even though your body needs less than one gram of sodium a day (about half a teaspoon of table salt). Eating too much salt can cause high blood pressure and lead to an increased risk of stroke, heart disease, kidney disease, memory loss, and erectile dysfunction. It may also worsen symptoms of bipolar disorder.

How sugar is hidden in food labels Do some detective work Spotting added sugar on food labels can require some sleuthing. Manufacturers are required to provide the total amount of sugar in a serving but do not have to spell out how much of this sugar has been added and how much is naturally in the food.

Added sugars must be included on the ingredients list, which is presented in descending order by weight. The trick is deciphering which ingredients are added sugars. They come in a variety of guises. Aside from the obvious ones—sugar, honey, molasses—added sugar can appear as agave nectar, cane crystals, corn sweetener, crystalline fructose, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, fructose, highfructose corn syrup, invert sugar, lactose, maltose, malt syrup, and more.

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A wise approach is to avoid products that have any of these added sugars at or near the top of the list of ingredients—or ones that have several different types of sugar scattered throughout the list. If a product is chock-full of sugar, you would expect to see “sugar” listed first, or maybe second. But food makers can fudge the list by adding sweeteners that aren’t technically called sugar. The trick is that each sweetener is listed separately. The contribution of each added sugar may be small enough that it shows up fourth, fifth, or even further down the list. But add them up and you can get a surprising dose of added sugar.

Let’s take as an example a popular oat-based cereal with almonds whose package boasts that it is “great tasting,” “heart healthy” and “whole grain guaranteed.”

Here’s the list of ingredients: Whole-grain oats, whole-grain wheat, brown sugar, almond pieces, sugar, crisp oats,* corn syrup, barley malt extract, potassium citrate, toasted oats,* salt, malt syrup, wheat bits,* honey, and cinnamon. *contain sugar, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and/or brown sugar molasses.

Combine brown sugar, sugar, corn syrup, barley malt extract, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, brown sugar molasses, and malt syrup, and they add up to a hefty dose of empty calories—more than one-quarter (27%) of this cereal is added sugar, which you might not guess from scanning the ingredient list. This type of calculation can be especially tricky in breakfast cereals, where most of the sugars are added.

Adapted with permission from Reducing Sugar and Salt, a special health report published by Harvard Health Publications.

Tips for cutting down on sugar and salt  

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Slowly reduce the sugar and salt in your diet a little at a time to give your taste buds time to adjust and wean yourself off the craving.

Avoid processed or packaged foods like canned soups, frozen dinners, or low-fat meals that often contain hidden sugar and sodium that quickly surpasses the recommended limit. Prepare more meals at home and use fresh or frozen vegetables instead of canned vegetables.

Be careful when eating out. Most restaurant and fast food meals are loaded with sodium. Some offer lower-sodium choices or you can ask for your meal to be made without salt. Most gravy, dressings and sauces are also packed with salt and sugar, so ask for it to be served on the side.

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Eat healthier snacks. Buy unsalted nuts and add a little of your own salt until your taste buds are accustomed to eating them salt-free. Cut down on sweet snacks such as candy, chocolate, and cakes. Instead, eat naturally sweet food such as fruit, peppers, or natural peanut butter to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Check labels and choose reduced-sodium and low-sugar products.

Use herbs and spices such as garlic, curry powder, cayenne or black pepper to improve the flavor of meals instead of salt.

Avoid sugary drinks. Try drinking sparkling water with a splash of fruit juice instead.

Healthy eating tip 7: Add calcium for bone health Your body uses calcium to build healthy bones and teeth, keep them strong as you age, send messages through the nervous system, and regulate the heart’s rhythm. If you don’t get enough calcium in your diet, your body will take calcium from your bones to ensure normal cell function, which can lead to osteoporosis.

Recommended calcium levels are 1000 mg per day, 1200 mg if you are over 50 years old. Try to get as much from food as possible and use only low-dose calcium supplements to make up any shortfall. Limit foods that deplete your body’s calcium stores (caffeine, alcohol, sugary drinks), do weight-bearing exercise, and get a daily dose of magnesium and vitamins D and K—nutrients that help calcium do its job.

Good sources of calcium include:  

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Dairy: Dairy products are rich in calcium in a form that is easily digested and absorbed by the body. Sources include low-fat milk, yogurt, and cheese.

Vegetables and greens: Many vegetables, especially leafy green ones, are rich sources of calcium. Try collard greens, kale, romaine lettuce, celery, broccoli, fennel, cabbage, summer squash, green beans, Brussels sprouts, asparagus, and crimini mushrooms.

Beans: such as black beans, pinto beans, kidney beans, white beans, blackeyed peas, or baked beans.

For more, see Calcium and Bone Health.

Healthy eating tip 8: Put protein in perspective

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Protein gives us the energy to get up and go—and keep going. While too much protein can be harmful to people with kidney disease, the latest research suggests that most of us need more high-quality protein from sources other than red meat and dairy, especially as we age.

How much protein do you need?

Protein needs are based on weight rather than calorie intake. Adults should eat at least 0.8g oflean, high-quality protein per kilogram (2.2lb) of body weight per day. 

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Older adults should aim for 1 to 1.5 grams of lean protein for each kilogram of weight. This translates to 68 to 102g of protein per day for a person weighing 150 lbs.

Divide your protein intake equally among meals.

Nursing women need about 20 grams more high-quality protein a day than they did before pregnancy to support milk production.

Source: Environmental Nutrition How to add high-quality protein to your diet  

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Replace red meat with fish, chicken, or plant-based protein such as beans, nuts, and soy.

Replace processed carbohydrates from pastries, cakes, pizza, cookies and chips with fish, beans, nuts, seeds, peas, tofu, chicken, low-fat dairy, and soy products.

Snack on nuts and seeds instead of chips, replace baked dessert with Greek yogurt, or swap out slices of pizza for a grilled chicken breast and a side of beans.

For more, see Good Ways to Get Quality Protein.

Healthy eating tip 9: Bulk up on fiber Eating foods high in dietary fiber can help you stay regular, lower your risk for heart disease, stroke, and diabetes, and help you lose weight. Depending on your age and gender, nutrition experts recommend you eat at least 21 to 38 grams of fiber per day for optimal health. Many of us aren't eating half that amount.

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In general, the more natural and unprocessed the food, the higher it is in fiber.

Good sources of fiber include whole grains, wheat cereals, barley, oatmeal, beans, nuts, vegetables such as carrots, celery, and tomatoes, and fruits such as apples, berries, citrus fruits, and pears.

There is no fiber in meat, dairy, or sugar. Refined or “white” foods, such as white bread, white rice, and pastries, have had all or most of their fiber removed.

An easy way to add more fiber to your diet is to start your day with a whole grain cereal or add unprocessed wheat bran to your favorite cereal.

How fiber can help you lose weight Since fiber stays in the stomach longer than other foods, the feeling of fullness will stay with you much longer, helping you eat less. Fiber also moves fat through your digestive system quicker so less of it is absorbed. And when you fill up on fiber, you'll also have more energy for exercising.

To learn more, read High-Fiber Foods.

Healthy eating tip 10: Learn your recommended daily amounts Recommended Daily Amounts Fruits and vegetables

At least five ½ cup servings

Calcium

1,000mg or 1,200mg if over 50

Fiber

21g to 38g

Protein

0.8g to 1.5g of high-quality protein per kilogram (2.2lb) of body weight

Saturated fat

No more than 16g

Trans fat

No more than 2g

Sugar

Keep calories from added sugars under 100 (24g or 6 teaspoons) for women and under 150 (36g or 9 teaspoons) for men

Sodium

No more than 1,500 to 2,300 mg (one teaspoon of salt)

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More help for healthy eating Healthy Eating Help Center: Explore these articles to help you make the right healthy eating choices for you and your loved ones.

Nutrition and diet     

The Mediterranean Diet: Myths, Facts, and Health Benefits of a Mediterranean Diet Good Ways to Get Quality Protein: Making Protein Choices To Boost Energy and Improve Your Health Choosing Healthy Fats: Good Fats, Bad Fats, and the Power of Omega-3s High-Fiber Foods: Benefits, Sources, and Getting More Fiber in Your Diet Calcium and Bone Health: Eating to Protect Your Bones and Prevent Osteoporosis

Cooking and grocery shopping   

Cooking for One: Cooking Quick, Healthy, and Inexpensive Meals for One Person Are Organic Foods Right for You? Understanding Organic Food Labels, Benefits, and Claims Eating Well on the Cheap: Saving Money on Healthy Food

Resources and references Healthy eating and mental health Mastering the mindful meal – Describes the importance of mindful eating, along with tips on how to eat more mindfully. (Brigham & Women’s Hospital) Diet and Mental Health – How dietary factors affect mental and emotional health.

(Mental Health Foundation) Healthy eating pyramids and plans Healthy Eating Plate And Healthy Eating Pyramid – The U.S. government has scrapped its MyPyramid icon in favor of the fruit-and-vegetable rich MyPlate—an improvement, yet one that still doesn't go far enough to show people how to make the healthiest choices. This is Harvard’s remedy. (Harvard School of Public Health)

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Healing Foods Pyramid – Emphasizes foods known to have healing benefits or essential nutrients, including plant-based choices. (University of Michigan) Living the MediterrAsian Way – People in Mediterranean and Asian cultures have long been known for their healthy diets and longevity. Here's how you can incorporate their dietary principles and lifestyle practices into your own life.

(Mediterrasian.com) Ten Tips Nutrition Education Series – A collection of tip sheets on healthy eating subjects like cutting back on sugar and salt, following a vegetarian diet and adding vegetables to your diet. (My Pyramid Nutrition Education Series) Healthy eating: carbs and protein What is protein? Information about what foods have protein and what happens when we eat more protein than we need. (Center for Disease Control) Optimal Dietary Protein Intake in Older People (may load slowly) – New evidence that shows older adults need more dietary protein than do younger adults.

(JAMDA) Environmental Nutrition Newsletter (subscription required) – June 2014 issue includes information on latest guidelines for suggested daily protein intake.

(Environmental Nutrition) Essential eating: fat Omega-3 Fats: An Essential Contribution - What Should You Eat... – All about health benefits of the important omega-3 fatty acids, including the best food sources in which to find them. (Harvard School of Public Health) Saturated or not: Does type of fat matter? Article that outlines the health values of different fats. (Harvard School of Public Health) The truth about fats – Understanding what counts as good fats, bad fats, and those in-between. (Harvard Health Publications) Face the Fats – (PDF) Describes the complicated relationship between good fats, bad fats, and various diseases. (Nutrition Action Healthletter) Healthy eating: sugar and salt LE PORTRAIT MAGAZINE

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Sodium Content of Your Food – How sodium affects your body and how to cut down on dietary sodium. Included tips on reading nutrition labels, and suggestions for cooking and shopping. (University of Maine – PDF) How to stay in the sodium safe zone – Tips to reduce your sodium intake and improve heart health. (Harvard Health Publications) Sugar exposed as deadly villain in obesity epidemic – Article about addictive sugar can be, with tips to cut down. (Guardian)

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