Excerpt from Sen’s Ninth and Final Notebook: S.+648 Days to S.+731 Days, Conjunctions:73
Biography
Debbie Urbanski’s stories have been published in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Sun, Kenyon Review, Nature, Terraform, Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Best American Experimental Writing. She is the recipient of a 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award.
I was educated in an old Sisters of Mercy convent school, where rumors of ghost nuns were ten a penny and were never especially convincing. However, when I was fourteen, I was in a math class and the teacher walked past me to the back of the room—I heard the movement of her long skirts and felt the displacement of air. A moment later, I put up my hand and looked behind me for help, but the teacher was still sitting ahead of me at her desk in front of the class.
As a big surprise for her birthday, I gave in and bought the dog she’d been wanting for a long time. A frisky little caramel-colored dachshund she immediately named Fredo after the weak Corleone brother in The Godfather, her favorite movie. I thought it an odd name but it was her choice and her dog.