By the third time the thought arrives, I’ve learned its manners. It doesn’t kick the door in. It doesn’t announce itself with a villain’s laugh. It comes the way a smell comes when someone two apartments down starts frying onions at midnight. A faint, unmistakable curl in the air. A suggestion. A maybe.

Rose had always been a profoundly uncurious person. Which is not the same thing as being stupid. Conventional you would say. To be frank, she went into medicine for the money. Yet, the allure of convention also prompted her to become a doctor. Medicine is prescriptive, not only in terms of the prescriptions doled out to the patient, but also in the actions dictated by the medical canon for the physician.

I think we all agreed that Mr Fallow was the best and most interesting teacher in the school. That much was clear after only a few months. It wasn’t until Cerys Davies expressed curiosity in his sexuality, however, that he really became a figure of fascination for us all and perhaps for me especially. He wasn’t from around here, you see.

Old Francisco Gutierrez lay in his bed, his stomach heavy and bloated. A white porcelain soup bowl crusted with the remnants of lunch cluttered his nightstand, joined by numerous orange plastic prescription vials, some tipped on their sides with a few crumbled pills inside, as if defeated by the weight of their responsibilities.

Ang Tuin’s temple was large and airy and now painted white, which he hated. All through his second life, there had been wood panelling which had filled the space with a rich scent of beeswax and nutmeg, but the tall men had come to make another one of their changes.

I am an emergency. My name is Bernie Smith, my colleagues at HR Block used to call me St. Bernard, like the hospital on the South Side, because I was always trying to save someone a few bucks. I still live a couple blocks from the hospital, near where the Dan Ryan Expressway split the old neighborhood in half, in a post-war cottage. It’s nice, white brick, with a long narrow backyard like a bowling alley.

The bright, green grass was covered in early morning dew drops. They slide down its blades and leave wet spots on my pumps. Rocking my weight on to the heel, and then back to my toes, I focus on how each shift digs the shoes further into the soft ground. I wish I could just take them off, stand even, and feel the earth with my toes.

All it took was one presentation to boost the B to an A plus. If it wasn’t for the awkward pauses, Macson would be enjoying the rest of the day. Students walked along the sidewalk under the awning of the film building. Macson sat on the edge of the sidewalk, staring at the drenched parking lot with rain splashing onto the pavement. His eyes were sunk. He ignored the tight knot that beat inside his throat.

The living room was quiet except for the soft hum of the dishwasher and the occasional rustle of pages turning. Mara sat on the couch, half-listening as her youngest, Nora, read aloud from the school library book they’d brought home that week. Upstairs, her older daughter, Talia, was finishing a science project at the desk they’d squeezed into the corner of her room.

Walter is feeling pleased with himself, barreling along the Autopista del Mediterráneo, or “AP-7,” as they call it, that starts way up by the French border, on his way to pick up Anna at the airport. It is a soft warm evening in September, the kind they take for granted now, the two of them, having lived on the Costa Blanca for fourteen years.

The southeast winds blew gently, caressingly, full of medicinal salts, carried in from the Atlantic Ocean, and fragrances from the vegetation on the shorelands that continued to emit spicy intoxicants ahead of the winter solstice. Bella and Beetle, two lovers on the barrier beach, lay within each other’s arms intertwined like one being, warmed by the burning driftwood they had collected and placed in the fire pit Beetle had dug.

I have walked this winding road a thousand times, though I swear it changes its face whenever I return.
Some days it greets me with the quiet of rain-soaked earth, other days with a brittle wind that sounds almost like a voice trying to call me back. I tell myself this is only memory playing tricks but yet memory has always been the wiser of us two.

He never liked smoking. He only liked the smoke—coiling, hovering, just above him,
a downpour held in suspension.
He loved that suspension.
She never liked heels. She only liked the sound they made on the floor—tap, tap, tap.
Like the way her heartbeat quickened whenever she passed his desk.
She loved that quickening.
He liked getting to the office early, making himself a cup of coffee. He would lean back against the wall.

Margie Olivia Murphy studied her desk calendar. She searched for time to verify the sparrow-sized bird with greenish-yellow breast and lavender wings—reported roosting at a nearby park by birding newbies—was the rare orchid oriole. If true, it would be number 748 on her Audubon Life List. She ran a finger down today’s box—2:30 Lena driving lesson/bank, 3:05 doggie day care Izzy pick-up, 3:45 Lena drop-off swim practice, 4:05 call Senator Hewett’s assistant–God update…

Malia wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. A foggy feeling enveloped her, the same as it had every day this past year. Pushing through the heaviness of insomnia was a daily battle. Highway 406 stretched further than either she or her son John could see. She tried to remember the last time she and her family traveled this highway, but her recollection was interrupted by the pounding in her ears.

“What does it mean to be African American?”
“Why do you ask that question?”
“At school, Sister Gracilda had me fill out a form and she told me to put a check mark next to the word ‘African American.’ Am I African American? What is an African American?”
“It means persons with African blood. Or better put, someone with African genes. Sometimes they’re also called Black.”
“Am I Black?”

The town of Curly had a single billboard, a faded, wind-wavering sign welcoming motorists to the Sandhills town of two hundred and forty-seven residents. There had been a complementary billboard on the opposite edge of town, but a twister had churned through decades ago, obliterating the sign.

The worst thing about my condition was the insomnia, the inability to get a good night’s sleep. I would go to bed early in the evening, exhausted by the torments of the day, and would promptly fall asleep, but by three o’clock in the morning I was fully awake again.

I refused to greet silver-haired mourners or point teary-eyed people toward the casket or absorb touching stories about Mona. Instead, I stayed glued to a metal folding chair at the front of the room, twirling my hair, staring at my mother’s waxy, shriveled body.

Delwyn nodded to the woman as he walked from his allocated parking space. She was leaning against a directional sign, her legs crossed at the ankles in a pose of inappropriate insouciance, a cigarette paused between her fingers, her face wreathed in a fine gray ash. He thought it unseemly for women to smoke and certainly not a good look for the hospital.

Robbie Crossman was five when his mother, Sally May, told him Bible stories, but her stories were different than those he heard in Sunday School. Instead of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, her stories were about Robbie himself and his parents. Even at a young age, he knew the place they lived wasn’t Judea; it was Indiana, and Indiana was in America.

I had a reputation for having a surly temperament. The surliness was a defense to the constant beratement from my father and his group at the club. I kept being told I was wrong, but I knew better. They were wrong. They lived in a wealthy bubble, protected from the real world where problems wandered the streets and seeped into the homes and apartments…

Levi woke up to the insistent sound of his alarm. It had the same rhyming beat as always, but for some reason, it sounded louder this morning, as though he had woken up for the first time in his life.

He sat up, stretching his back until he felt a satisfying pull in his shoulders. At thirty-five years old, his body ached in places that were vaguely familiar. By the time he’d made coffee, his thoughts drifted to his day ahead.

I divide my life into two parts: before Hiland Mountain and after. The time between I don’t dwell on much. Why should I? It was as bleak as Eagle River’s sky in November, a granite dome strung with nimbus clouds that blocked all light and yielded only biting rain and hail. Through the steel bars, the land around the facility was covered with a thin layer of frost and ice, where off in a distant and unattainable horizon a few dots hinted at Anchorage city life.