"God's Work" from The New York Stories is Hypertext Magazine excerpt and filled with joy we are.

An excerpt of God's Work by @BenTanzer - the beauty and acidity of everyday life. Gorgeous stuff. Don't miss it. http://t.co/fM3Rc7tze6

— Hypertext Magazine (@HypertextMag) October 14, 2015

And there you have it. Did we mention we are thankful too? Because we are. Mightily. Excerpt of the excerpt? Word.

"I look into her deep brown eyes, something I’ve been doing since I first got lost in them back in high school, and though she may still be speaking, I’m elsewhere, thinking about her breast cancer scare, not even a year before, sitting with her in Two Rivers Hospital, and watching the drip, drip, drip of the chemo trickling into her arm, killing the twisted cells intent on killing her.

At first everyone seemed so old there in the cancer ward, the wispy hair and ashen skin, and they were, but I soon realized that we were old now too, Alice and me, not old, old, but not young either, and somewhere in the second half of our lives.

“Hey,” she said during one especially bad morning when she could not get out of bed, “if I somehow beat this, and then it comes back, I’m not doing all this again, I can’t, and I need to know that you’re good with that?”

“Yeah,” I said lying, wanting every moment with her, every breath, and touch.

“You’re fucking lying,” she said, “you’re a terrible fucking liar, it’s probably the main reason you never cheated on me, but I’m serious, so look me in the eye and say ‘cool,’ because I need your blessing, I need to know you get it, and that you’re really listening, not that thing you usually do.”

“Yeah,” I said, “cool.”

She had recovered though, and now here we were talking sex, or not, and tradition, though not tradition that involved sex apparently."