. . . . . I REMEMBER THE CARROTS I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life, a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be – the advance of fulfillment, and of desire – all these needs met, then unmet again. When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots, their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot. And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots and carried them, like a prize, to my father who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop. I loved them: my own bright dead things. I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong. Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented the contentment of the field. Why must we practice this surrender? What I mean is: there are days I still want to kill the carrots because I can. —a.l.