Some Settling May Occur

You bend down for a dropped sock, and a sound comes out of you. Low. Involuntary. A geological unngh, the noise a porch makes in February — the exact noise your father made every Sunday of your childhood, rising toward his shoes. You stay down there a moment, holding the sock like a small white surrender flag, and you realize the truth nobody warned you about: the warranty has entered its interesting phase, and no one sent the paperwork.

Some Settling May Occur is the owner's manual you never got. In seventeen warm, wickedly observant comic pieces, Roz Kessler maps the small indignities and quiet tendernesses of the middle years — the menu you now hold at arm's length like something you found in a drawer, the reading glasses pushed up on the very head you're tearing the house apart to find, the injury sustained while sleeping, the room you entered for reasons that were confiscated at the threshold by an unseen hand. Here is the man felled by reaching for the remote, gamely trying to file it as work-related. Here is the sneeze that declares war on your fourth vertebra. Here is the moment you catch yourself guarding the thermostat like a national border and understand, with the cold clarity of a person finding a familiar face in the mirror, that you are quietly becoming the management.

Kessler promises no cream, no serum, no eight-week plan to defeat time. What she offers is rarer and harder to come by: the specific relief of opening a book and finding your own creaking, forgetting, beloved life already inside it, set down by someone winging it exactly as badly as you are. Recognition. Company. The lights on in the next house over.

Funny enough to read aloud to whoever's groaning out of the chair beside you, kind enough to make getting older feel less like a betrayal and more like a homecoming.

Settle in. Lie down for best results. Start reading.