I had never heard anything quite like it before, yet there was something familiar about it. It was almost songlike, this noise, punctuated with agony and mournfulness.

Everything about this day has felt different from the beginning. It all started when her mother made bacon and eggs for breakfast. They usually only have bacon on Sundays.

Roland Harris felt as though the wind was piercing through his grey woollen overcoat, one April day, when the sky was overcast with clouds that seemed to threaten to pour down rain onto Kings Cross Station and its surroundings.

The city of Calcutta lights up in the month of December, especially for the bourgeois families. There is a social event every evening and bars and country clubs are filled with patrons eating and drinking copiously, dancing till dawn, and overall having a gala time.

Shortly after the funeral, (whether it was days or weeks, she couldn’t say), Helen found a small jar containing six dead yellow jackets at the foot of Harry’s unmade bed. When she asked, Harry told her, “Bees can see faces…”

Frances first saw Jack in the winter of 1947 at a debutante party. He was with a blond-haired girl whom Frances later found out was his cousin, and who left him alone for most of the evening.

At first Lindsay thought the beat-up F150 and overloaded U-Haul trailer parked in front of her brother’s building belonged to Northeastern students moving out, but then she recognized the old oak drop-leaf table wedged precariously on the back.

Viola.
She sits still in the café, thinking about his words. How can he do this to her, to them? She watches Jeff’s eyes looking for a tear—something, but there is nothing, not a clue his heart is suffering. She thought he loved her.

Maybe you’ve lost
your patience
with your country
with a loved one
with yourself.

Commutes are the distances between
events. Some days I’m stuck with these
Black Mountain hipsters, pissing off
their North End balconies even on
a Tuesday.

Auntie Jane’s blanket,
attic stored, air cloved,
with her knitted cable yarn
she hums a morning tune.

To enjoy his selected poems
he only reads the first stanza
before going to bed
and keeps the second one

From the window of the faded ranch
I watched a bird floating in the kiddie pool:
a loon, with its reticulated band of stars.
I knew which bird it was from the tilt

A small truck stood curbside in front of a narrow store; a florist was taking delivery as I approached. The shop’s metal cellar doors, normally flat and flush with the sidewalk, were opened and upright revealing the steps to the storage area below the shop.

I haven’t always wanted to be
in the same boat with them
but when the time comes, I hope
there’ll be room for me in that lifeboat

When I was sixteen, I took organ lessons from a dour, quick-tempered, talented British man named Mr. Williams. No one else I’ve known, either before or since, was as self-sacrificing for his instrument. Nor as old-fashioned. In the nine or so months I was his student, I never saw him dressed in anything other than a three-piece suit that had long gone out of style, a tie with what appeared to be a school crest on it, and horn-rimmed glasses dating back to the Kennedy administration. A gold cross was invariably pinned to his lapel. He was the only man I knew who still used Brylcreem in his hair, so much so that it looked like a solid, shiny mass. Not that he was an especially old man. Rather, he seemed ageless somehow, as if caught outside of time, belonging neither to the present nor to some earlier era.

As Zach flew over the handlebars of his mountain bike, his body a rigid missile parallel to the ground, he figured it’d be bad. He’d been going pretty fast. On the good luck side, nothing too serious broke save a couple of ribs – those hurt like a mother, though. On the bad luck side, he landed next to a rattler who promptly bit him in the shin. He hollered to holy hell, rousting a couple of homeless guys who had been squatting peacefully not ten yards from the trail. A small but vigorous debate ensued.

Once upon a time, I met a girl.
Now, you’re probably thinking two things. One: Jacob, for God’s sake, you’re a writer. You’re really going to begin the story with ‘once upon a time’? What is this, a Grimm fairytale? And two: a long, extended groan followed by, another story about a boy and a girl?
But it’s not like you think.
She’s not like you think.
I want to start from the beginning, but right now she’s next to me, and I’m reminded of why I haven’t been able to write a single thing for the last six months.

Thomas leans his head against the fuselage and looks down through the Lexan window. The homes remind him of a town model his father had once made in their attic when he was a young boy. The streets, like small veins, separate the cluster of suburban Floridian homes. Their peaked roofs are all two-toned from the sunset. He imagines his house, empty and distant, buried beneath the cover of an elevated train in South Queens, and how the sun will peak from behind the steel columns for that brief moment outside his kitchen window, and how he won’t be there to see it.

Lainie emerged from her shock, lying on her side in the driveway surrounded by a black wreath of cleft-chinned superheroes in boots and helmets. She noted the gravel in her hair before wincing at the tenderness of two small broken bones in her left hand, various bruised ribs, and shrapnel-inflicted gash above her ankle.
It was a mistake any mortal could make, exploding her gas grill by forgetting to open the lid before turning on the gas.

Here it was, the opportunity of a lifetime to finally have everything that I wanted. No more of the desperate longing to look like the images I saw on Instagram. My self-doubt would be gone, replaced by an inner confidence that only I would know about. I had done everything possible on my own to pass and fit into what society deemed presentable but had always come up short. This long- awaited advantage would even things out for me and save me years of wasted time and money. So when it was my turn to order, I didn’t berate myself.

Towards the end of spring, when the air is still cold and bites at your cheeks, and a thick blanket of mist covers the ground, a large black truck approaches a small Danish town. When it reaches the town limit, it stops and a man jumps out. He’s in his forties, wearing a creased, high-end suit that looks as though he has slept in it. His hair, dark and sprinkled with gray, stands up from the back of his head like on a baby heavy with sleep. He runs his hands through it as he squints at the bright morning sun, which is beginning to penetrate the clouds. Then he waves at the truck driver, shuts the door, and turns to face the town.

Muriel decided to catalog the desiccated remains herself. Her heart raced. Her fingers tingled. Electric lanterns placed every few feet illuminated the cave. Layers of dust and the neglect of time conspired to make it all but unrecognizable. Was it female or male? From when? She studied it, looking for signs. So much anticipation. So much hanging in the balance. Her doctoral students and undergraduates gathered, hushed and eager. The small team of researchers, on the twenty-ninth day of a thirty-five-day dig, had made little progress until Guillermo, a first-timer, found what looked to be a canvas jacket from the First Common Era baked into the wall of the dry Nevada desert cave.

The ventilator whirred mechanically, patients’ chests rising as the oxygen pumped through their lungs. Donna stood by the man she had seen intubated hours beforehand. His breath at times steadying momentarily was a forced gasping rattle. She wondered who he was.
A middle-aged man with greying hairs amongst patchy brown. Quite possibly handsome, aside from the current predicament. His youthful face now drained from the sensation of drowning. He was in the throes of acute respiratory distress syndrome, as a result of the virus. Watching him, Donna’s own breath belaboured beneath her mask.