Cover Photo: J. Longo
J. Longo

We’re (Kind of) All in This Together: Watching the World Cup at the End of the World

It isn’t that we sought to separate the “real world” from the matches—just that, for a time, we had something else to think about.

This is Asides and Offsides, a World Cup 2018 notebook by Bryan Washington.

We had already veered back into reality. It hadn’t taken very much. But then my mother texted her friend, asking her what we should bring, and they said, Nothing, just yourselves. We’ll be here when you show up.

Bryan Washington is the author of Lot, with fiction and essays appearing in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, BuzzFeed, Vulture, The Paris Review, Boston Review, Tin House, One Story, Bon Appétit, MUNCHIES, American Short Fiction, GQ, FADER, The Awl, Hazlitt, and Catapult. He’s the recipient of an O. Henry Award, and he lives in Houston.