Fiction: Sanjana is trying to divorce Killian. But there’s a problem. He is missing

The first time I saw Killian, he was nude. Pale, toned, illumined by an unflattering cone of yellow lighting, like Michelangelo’s David on display in a Walmart. I was in my first year of graduate school, attending something called a Naked Supper Club at the home of a forestry school student named Elsa, who hosted monthly dinners consisting entirely of foraged vegetables, roots, and fungi. Elsa had several housemates, most of them PhD candidates whose favorite hobby was threatening to drop out of their respective programs for a more stable life. There was a dreamy man named Ronald who studied the physics of music; his primary partner, Wendy, a public health student who hoped to force the city into legally recognizing throuples one day; a heroin-chic comp lit fuckboi named Rhys who was rumored to be a Kennedy cousin; and Killian Bane – not a graduate student but an actor.

I was there on my fourth date with an art historian named Viktor, who’d known Elsa since prep school.

“You have really great conversations at these,” Viktor had said, after recounting the housemates’ names and school affiliations, as we traipsed up the hill to East Rock. “Nudity levels the playing field, you know....

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