Matt and his dad stand in front of their garage door facing the mud and almond dust caked truck.
“Let’s bring it to a carwash.”
“We’re fine, Matt; everyone’s asleep. No one will hear us. We’ll just wash the truck and then we’re done ’til we have to move the almonds. Just like we planned.”
His dad walks over to the side of the garage to turn on the hose. Matt loses count of the squeaks from the rusty faucet and the curses from his dad. The adrenaline is leaving Matt now, an hour after their theft, and a weariness set in.

It was the third Sunday in September in the year of our lord eighteen hundred and sixty-three when Private Ephraim Prometheus Boone lost his left foot. His body had been found in the dim evening lying on the battlefield beside an injured dirt-coated bullmastiff that his company had named Abe and a wounded Confederate who was called Asher, and they each grunted and whimpered in the back of an ambulance wagon rolling twelve miles over dirt and gravel in the dark. The wagon parked outside the First Presbyterian Church made of brick where the wounded were carried inside to the pews serving as hospital cots for a haunted congregation exceeding one hundred men chanting and moaning demented hymns written by the Underworld.

I went to Vietnam in 1968 as a young, naïve kid, serving with the First Cavalry Division. By the end of my tour, I was no longer quite so naïve. Typical, I think, of so many kids who went to Vietnam thinking they were serving freedom and democracy when, in fact, we were serving the political ambitions of dictators in Vietnam and the political ambitions of those running our country at the time.

I’d been hard at work eliminating redundancies in the latest antidepressant survey when my phone started buzzing, Zoë’s name on the screen. Laptop and binders all across the kitchen table, dirty dishes piling up, half-drunk bottle of cab on the counter, even though I don’t drink, not while I’m working, not usually. But this week wasn’t usually. The disappearances had me on edge, for one thing—at first just background noise, but then I heard a name on the radio, someone I used to know in grad school, and it had started seeming very real and very wrong.

Look out of the window. Focus in on the droplets streaming across the glass. Focus back out on the road, the lampposts zipping past in blurred grey stripes. Summon up your old friend, the giant orang-utan, who swings from the T-bar of one lamppost to another, keeping up with the cars as they speed down the M25. Get bored with the orang-utan – you are too old for this now. Shuffle, look straight ahead. Change the radio station to Kiss FM, even though the music makes you feel uncomfortable.

“I can’t. I can’t open this car door,” wails seven-year old Samantha, hand tugging awkwardly – ineffectively – on the inside handle of her parents’ bulky old Suburban station wagon. I was in Florida for a weekend visit from Chicago. We’d spent the morning at Lowry Park Zoo. Although it wasn’t quite naptime, both of us were a little worn from an overabundance of orangutans and ostriches on a hot tropical day.

I have a clear image of myself: I’m looking for my bicycle in the garage. I needed it to bike to my friend Abigail’s house but couldn’t find it anywhere.
Turrets of dust particles floated upwards. Exposed by horizontal, flat rays of light breaking through the dust-heavy aluminum window blinds. I watched as they rose, spiraling around and around, higher and higher up into the garage rafters until out of sight.

When the girl wanders into the living room in the morning, her mother is seated cross-legged on the piano bench, phone pressed to her ear.
The girl toes the rattling skeletons of the open boxes. How can it be, she wonders, that as the boxes are emptied, the house only feels emptier? Does the emptiness come from the boxes? Is that the secret of moving? That you move the emptiness from one place to another? That you stuff boxes full of books and clothes and photographs and toolboxes, but the true heaviness comes from the emptiness, an emptiness that leaks from the boxes and sinks into the pit of her stomach?

Take the exit when you see the sign and leave the highway. A small narrow road will take you there. You’ll not be surprised how you missed it, nestled away from the day-to-day neurosis of shopping therapy, road rage and commuter traffic. A medley of native trees and shrubs line the road in places interspersed with glimpses of ocean blue in the distance. As the land flattens, the road lines with melaleucas, their raggedy white trunks a wall of papier mâché bones, and clears to low growing coastal heathland and saltmarsh. In spring it will come alive in a multitude of tints, tones and textures.

Weary sun sighs deeply.
Rattlesnakes seek solace.
Tumbleweeds bleed wisdom.
Saguaro reach deep into green pockets
of scattered water loose
in rancid blankets of arid certainty.
Scorpions seethe, swallowing sand,
each and every granule
a microcosm of the infinite.

When she delivered him, occipito posterior, the back
of his skull cradled against her sacrum,
when he crowned, face up, chin up,
it was her father’s chin, her father’s
nose, his broad strong Scotish countenance.
My father was there, wearing a hospital mask, ear to ear,
stretched across his face like a sheet spread at birth,
she would say later it was the first time
she’d seen him cry, her husband.

We are projections on a sheet in the yard,
suspicious spools of film liberated from metal cans.
When there is nothing left to play, the children retreat
to flashlight tag, and the women refresh their wine.

The men huddle in the darkness.
Someone is talking about the circus,

Nina and her daughters are waiting for the slowest elevator on the lower campus. Emma is stomping around, pressing the up button and yammering “come, come, come” in her four-year-old fashion, while Carmen, age eighteen months, is sound asleep, stretched out in the stroller, one shoe dangling perilously from her stockinged foot. Nina exhales theatrically as she watches their blurry reflections in the elevator’s chrome doors, wondering whether Oscar will be pleased to see them once they reach his office.

Introduction
Jack’s piano instructor had high hopes for him. “It’s a matter choosing the right material,” she said. Mrs. Metzer was a thin, angular woman in her fifties. In her music studio, a giant gable of wood and glass, a row of autographed publicity photos lined a shelf that ran along the entire wall of windows. Many of these photographs were from regionally acclaimed musicians, mostly pianists, along with some world-renowned conductors, cellists, and violinists.

The instructions were simple: Choose an item that piques your interest, put it on and walk down the runway. This would give you an idea of what it was like to be someone else.
David caught wind of it while eavesdropping at a bar in the Lower East Side. It was a former dive that had been renovated to cater to an affluent crowd, the place David had spent most nights since his divorce from June and the funeral that he wasn’t invited to.

Imagine a tree is uprooted. It can be replanted, over, and over again. But each time it is damaged just that little bit more. Each time, it finds it harder to adjust to its new environment. Each time, its memory of that original piece of land where it first saw the sun grows more faint. Imagine that feeling. It’s hard to verbalize it when you don’t know exactly what it is…

The day of the disaster began with the sun gently rousing the living. My bedroom window was east-facing and curtainless, so in the summer months I woke early, because the light was so strong.
That day was a Saturday, and Saturdays were usually the best day of the week.

I don’t remember my mother’s face. Just her voice. I was about three years old when I awoke to sounds of screaming. Between her huffy sobs, I heard these words streaming from my parents’ off-limits bedroom:
“They are monsters! Ugly monsters! How could anything so ugly come from inside of me?”

It was the late 1970s and I sat so young and gullible while a moderator caught a glimpse of my sorrow mirrored in the reflection of his warm brown eyes as I listened intently to words of mass emotional destruction. I wanted to sort out grief and identity issues, and so I enlisted in a weekend of minimal bathroom breaks, minimal sleep, and meditative moments where I traversed the galaxies into my own creative process.

I went to the hospital first thing on a Wednesday morning because I knew I was dying. I called and called and had to wait and that was the earliest I could come. I told Doctor Simon that, and he did not look up at me because he probably did not know how to tell me that, yes, I was in fact dying, and at a faster rate than most of the schleps that came into his office every day.

One June day of my freshman year/ninth grade, in 1985, I needed a break from studying. My mother suggested we go out for ice cream to Tajrish Circle. Tajrish, a shopping area on the skirt of the mountains in the northern part of Tehran, was a favorite place for my mother and me to wander, especially for window shopping and mouthwatering snacks. My father disagreed.

I’m sitting in my grandmother’s backyard, lying in the sun on a lounge chair. Tears fill my eyes, and soon I’m sobbing. At times I justify my crying at everything, saying that sensitive people are the best kind of people, but at other times, like now, I do not justify it. I know that I am behaving like a fool.

As he lay dying, Bug Boy remembered the first spider, the Argiope Aurantia, curled up against the glass of the Ragu jar that his father pulled from the freezer. Of course, no one called him Bug Boy then, and he didn’t have his thick-framed glasses with the coke-bottle lenses. Both the name and the glasses were years away on that summer day with the sun’s rays beaming through the clear panes of his family’s patio doors. He was only Todd Olden then. Not Bug Boy. Not a delinquent. Not a dropout. Not a user. Not a murderer.

A blast of humid air swarmed Mallory’s head as he bent over his pedalboard. Sweat dripped down his neck, saturating the collar of his black T-shirt. The temperature inside the club was at least a hundred. The club staff had yet to turn on large fans on each side of the stage, around the seating area, and by the bar. The air conditioning was broken. Two weeks of ninety plus degree days had overpowered it, the manager told him. So unusual for Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in June. The repair crew was on their way; with any luck they would be able to fix the problem before the show, but there were no guarantees. It was just Mallory’s bad luck to be there on this particular day.