They sat in an outdoor café having a latte and a ham cachito. Her boss talked about the weather, how the government wanted to subsidize payroll, which was their way to get inside the company and eventually take it over. He put a cigarette in his mouth and offered one to Alejandra. She declined. She didn’t smoke. And while she enjoyed watching the clouds above the Avila mountain, the spacious sidewalks covered in tables, and people playing an afternoon game of chess, she was still wondering why her boss asked her to lunch.

My head felt like an overripe summer squash.
It was starting out to be a grim day. Though you’d never know it from looking at me, I felt like I had been cloistered all night in an assisted living facility for psychopathic chairs—a command centre for the flotsam of miserable furniture, retired and warehoused, a hub with just enough of a pleasant environment to give the illusion of living in luxury. Night terrors. I struggled to make sense of my present reality. Being a chair had its complications.

Jake tried to kill me, Lizzie had said.
A lie, of course. But she spread it far and wide before she left California for Indiana: He tried to choke me, she’d repeat.
But—Christ!—it was just a hug, and it went down like this:
Hannah had burst into our room, turned on the light, and demanded to know which one of us was taking her to practice. Lizzie kicked me under the sheets—evidently it was my turn—but I kicked her back, club swim had been her stupid idea, just grant me a little rest.

You knew your father had been having heart problems. Of course, you knew that. But you had not been paying enough attention—not the right kind of attention—to factually comprehend just how critical his condition might have become. In the year following your mother’s death, you were aware that he was paying ever-lessening attention to what she had hopefully called her “heartful, healthful” advice regarding his diet. And he had slacked off his previous daily walking routines and even stopped his weekly bowling league participation.

Words are my enemy. Spoken. Written. It doesn’t matter. They’re out to get you. Birth certificates, applications, references, diplomas, licenses, interviews, gossip, whispers, family stories, newspapers articles, books, magazines, all of it, all of it, is just waiting to do you in. Words are a trap, a snare. They will catch you, crush you, cripple you. They push you around from the moment you’re born.

The Chief Justice would not consent to die. He had felt the tremors first in his fingers, when the train had departed Niagara Falls, but dismissed the barely perceptible tingling as the motion of the locomotive over the rails. But now, the right side of his mouth began to droop, and he sought to speak but could not. He tried to lift his arm, to motion to the other gentlemen in the first-class compartment, the rocking of the train having lulled them to sleep, but it was too late.

Hannah’s death was doubly final. Lizzie burned her, then took the whole urn with her when she left for Indiana—you don’t get any part of her, Lizzie told me.
And then Lizzie buried her.
Heaven and Earth are full of thy glory, the preacher said.
But I keep her toenails around my neck, in a locket strung on a silver chain.
Hosanna in the highest, the preacher said.
Holy shit.

The memory is barely a memory. The night is a wound healed over, skin knit back together until it’s almost eerily smooth—a silky stretch of scar tissue betraying its otherness. It’s flashes of light cutting through trees, hot salt on my tongue, gurneys bumping over the curb and sliding into the backs of ambulances. It’s needles stabbing flesh, hands examining every inch of me, searching for answers.

Chelsea Hartman stared out of her bedroom window, a dull ache deep within her chest. Her once vibrant world had become a monochromatic landscape, devoid of laughter and girlhood friends. Just like every morning for the past few weeks, she watched as the sun peeked through the clouds that hung over Southern California. The sudden closure of her school just as she was about to return after Spring Break marked the beginning of her isolated life.

“Richard, how goes it?”
“It’s another day in paradise.”
That was a repetition of Richard’s throughout my time at Beal. Intended to be ironic, he and I both knew Beal wasn’t paradise. He and I both knew it wasn’t hell either.

May 1955
“You mean the green note?”
Miss Talone hit a key on the piano with a firm finger. “C-sharp—above middle C.”
Brenda Canavan played the D scale backwards and forwards. “Like that?”
Miss Talone nodded. “Good, just like G, but with C-sharp added.” She smiled. “Or, the green note, as you called it.”

I used to be an oak tree. Or maybe it was a maple. Regardless, there was a nest in my branches, a twiggy little thing woven with scraps of yarn, strands of dental floss, and kiss-curls of hair. I gave it to the sky, but it was always empty.

It’s the lunch rush at Pyszne, the restaurant where I work every weekday from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon. Pyszne, which is pronounced push-nah, has the distinction of being the only Polish restaurant in the neighborhood of Bloomfield, Pittsburgh’s Little Italy.

I shuffle to my room, shut the door, and curl into the reading chair under my loft bed, surrounded by my books. When I moved in with my aunt and uncle, I didn’t expect to get my own room. This used to be Uncle Nate’s home office. When Mom and I came to visit, my uncle would blow up the air mattress for Mom, while I always shared a room with Cara. I love my cousin, but there have been many times over the last year when I was glad for a private refuge.

She died in June, just shy of fifteen.
Dust to dust, the preacher told us.
Lizzie refused to look at me, but I knew what she was thinking: our daughter’s death was my fault.
Ashes to ashes, the preacher told us, Lord have mercy.
I wanted to sock the platitudes right out of his fat-lipped mouth—how can there be mercy death? No, Hannah’s death had no mercy.

Crickets sing as I dart down the small, dimly lit road allotted for the restaurant’s deliveries. I stand on the sidewalk across the road with my back to the large building, unsure what to do at this point. Closing my eyes, I take another steadying breath.
Breathe.
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
And again.
Deep breaths. You can do this, Winnie. I try to convince myself. Everything is going to be fine –

Edith fell deeper into a nightmare while her younger sister, Wiktoria, busied herself in the kitchen. The apartment was small enough that the sounds of Wiktoria’s two small children eating their breakfasts carried into the spare room where Edith slept and transformed into the soundscape of her nightmare.

He took the fat wooden hangers out, made room for his Bible, Bakunin’s manifesto on anarchy, thankfully thin, stuffed neatly between testaments. The guards at Castle Gardens would no doubt rifle through his dirty frontier shirts and gravy-stained zupan.

The water level rose to the floor of their hut despite it being a few feet off the ground. Nimuel rushed around their home, gathering everything he could carry while Ligaya got herself and their newborn together. She moved slowly, still sore from giving birth only hours before.

I have never deified my older brother, Eddy, in the way younger siblings often worship their older counterparts. I didn’t have a desire to follow him around like a lost puppy, demanding to tag along on adolescent excursions. For one thing, he was four years my senior.

The house creaked, and with a mighty groan, heaved itself out of a funk, and stood up to meet the sun simmering directly overhead. Cicadas in the yard welcomed it back with a rousing chorus, the first of countless refrains to be heard throughout the sultry day.

Arlo and Ruth Kershaw remained good neighbors. They hired Jesse to do yard work, even though they could have gotten along without the help. He was mowing their back yard on a pleasant, September afternoon when Ruth received a call from Jesse’s Uncle Ray.

Like the original mother Mary, Mariá Elena Moyano – known affectionately as la negra by the masses – was considered a mother not just to her own two sons, whom she adored, but also to the thousands of children of Villa El Salvador, the largest shantytown in Lima. She had run hundreds of communal kitchens and the extensive Glass of Milk program since her days as president of the Women’s Federation of Villa El Salvador. By February of 1992, by which time she was vice-mayor of the town of three hundred thousand people, the program delivered a glass of milk each day to sixty thousand children and elderly who would otherwise succumb to malnutrition.

In France, I met Irving Rivera, a Puerto Rican born in New York City, about twenty years older than me. He lived on the same floor as I did in the Maison Américaine at the Cité Universitaire in Paris. I saw him often, since there was a cafeteria in the basement of the dorm room, where both he and I often ate. We gravitated toward a group of Spanish-speaking friends, some Latin American but mostly Spaniards, who also lived at the huge American dormitory. I would also regularly see Irving on a table in the plaza behind the Maison Américaine, with a sign saying, “Independence for Puerto Rico Now!” He requested donations, ostensibly to help rid Puerto Rico of its American colonial masters.