by Kate Folk
After we spent most of dinner talking about his recent breakup, Craig asked how everything’s been going with me. We were eating at this awful buffet-style restaurant near my apartment. Craig is a man, which is the type of person I sometimes have sex with, but luckily I’ve never wanted to have sex with this particular man, my friend Craig. I was nodding at the right times and not saying much otherwise, and for once this was the right thing to do—I could tell by the way that he, Craig, continued talking and moving his face in a way that indicated he felt heard and supported by his friend, who in this case was me. In this human interaction I was frankly excelling. But when Craig shifted the subject to things happening in my life, my ears started ringing and Craig’s face blurred and the room swelled and then snapped back into place.
6S
Kate Folk is a 2019-2021 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. Above are the opening six sentences of "Dinner with Craig," published in full here in The Adroit Journal.