On June 21, 1941, forty-four year old Frida W., a resident of Kyiv, dropped a hand-held mirror, which shattered on impact. This happened around nine PM, at the end of a hot and sunny summer day. (On the evening news, the radio announcer had shared predictions of a record wheat harvest). The mirror fell as Frida was brushing out her hair, which was still black and full and hung down to her lower back.
She sits up and the duvet glides across her torso, only covering her body waist down, the humid chill within the room penetrating through her exposed right shoulder where her husband’s T-shirt, which she dons as nightwear, hangs loose. She can’t see clearly because the moon’s a crescent, and it barely lets light into the narrow corridor leading from the walk-in closet to the part of the room that contains their bed
Grandfather’s clock struck at dawn when Father woke me up and said:
“Today you are a man.”
I was twelve years old.
With nothing more to say, Father left my room, leaving me to the morning rise.
I sat up and swung my legs out of bed—my feet had been able to reach the floor in this position ever since the previous summer—and with shaky sleepiness, I rose to standing in my embroidered linen nightgown.
The unpaved, bumpy red clay roads are throwing dust onto my windshield. The air is thick from the summer humidity. The sweat on my forehead rolls down my nose and onto my top lip. It is July in the small southern town of Leesburg, Georgia. Passion fills my soul. I am looking for a woman. Her name is unknown to me. I will know her when I see her.
I step out of the doorway of my building onto the morning street under the grey ash-toned sky.
A woman is jogging down the sidewalk, her feet leaving footprints in the ash film which covers everything. A man who I see so often on my street (yet whose name I do not know) waves to me and enters a darkened car. Then he silently goes on his phone, while sitting in the driver’s seat.
The family cruise had been Aunt Jane’s idea. Always the organizer, she sent a group text with a link to the cruise line’s website and a caption that read, “Kleinfelters Take to the Seas!” One month later, a gaggle of family and I were booking our passage on the Festivities II for a five-day Caribbean cruise. Including spouses, partners, and kids, there were twenty of us. My sister Lizzie, four years older, had volunteered to design reunion T-shirts
Dear,
Do you remember the story I told you about that extraordinary girl I once mentioned? I’ve learnt something more about her and simply must tell you.
She was born into an ordinary family. Everything around her was simple — a kind father, a gentle mother, a small room in a small flat filled with books. She wasn’t beautiful, only quietly remarkable
Maya almost missed the turn.
The GPS told her, in a voice that sounded both apologetic and bored, to take the next right. Only there was no next right, just a paved shoulder and a strip of sand where grass tried to grow and failed. The sign itself appeared at the last moment, a rectangle of worn blue metal almost the same color as the January sky.
The Petrov’s are a married couple who built a biotech company in Boston. The CEO, Dimitry Petrov, 45, a doctor, was born into poverty in Russia. His wife Anastasia Shevchenco, 39, is Ukrainian and considered a genius in math. She is heavily involved in AI research. She is also a vocal leader in the global efforts to convince U.S. and foreign governments
On the cobblestone street in De Wallen, Alexis stands beside her friend Hannah and the two men who’ve just bought them a round of drinks. The glare of the streetlamps brightens the men’s faces: Greg and Dustin, American finance professionals visiting their company’s Dutch office. Although they’ve only been acquainted for an hour, the four of them have shared enough travel anecdotes
The relief I felt at my father’s funeral was something the old timers had told me to look forward to. Savor it, they’d said. It’s the end of the beginning.
I was sad, of course. But the relief was stronger.
My mother’s funeral, a year prior, had been the beginning. There was much to do, and my two siblings and I did our duty to our mother.
Frank never minded the small things, and as the squeak from the cartwheels bounced off the naked, white walls, he didn’t mind that either.
The hall was dark except the faint glows of the half-lit fluorescent lights that shone on the linoleum tiled floors. The halls themselves weren’t too long, but long enough for Frank’s left knee to start acting up again.
We would walk on the white beach of Marco Island with stale bread wrapped in a recycled red-and-blue polka-dot bread bag. We tossed hardened crumbs while droves of seagulls descended into my mother’s hands peeling shrills of joy. “Jennifer, get a picture of these maniacs!” My mother would laugh with complete abandonment. She would be encircled like a Hitchcock movie with seagulls eating right from her hands.
The fluorescent lights of Sunnyvale Manor didn’t flicker, but they hummed with a low-frequency dread that matched the static in Helena’s brain. For six job-searching months, Helena’s world had been the size of a mattress. She knew the topography of her ceiling fan better than the faces of her friends.
The rain started on a Thursday night and it never quite stopped again. The moments which were not absolute downpours were marked by dark, heavy hours of gusting wind and gnarled thunder from some far-off place outside the city. It was as though the sun had turned in her resignation papers. Or was forced to resign in some galactic government coup.
Moratok towers above the low-country fog at dawn. Regal his great crown of antlers, the pride of grace. Untamed and almost golden, his neck carries shining slivers of tension. Eyes like dark glass marbles, the tenderness unexpected.
It was cruel that Elder Raena had survived the harshest winter in thirteen years only to die on the fifth day of spring. The remaining three members of the village knew the day was near and feared what it required of them next. Her body was getting colder, more frail over the past two weeks despite the growing warmth in the air.
My mornings always began the same way—I woke up and saw the wall. On that wall was a thin strip of torn wallpaper that grew wider and wider each day. If I managed to tear off too big a piece, I knew it was time to cut my nails.
Between the yellow canola stalks that whistled in the wind, rippled like waves, shimmered like the hush of sunlight on silk, and towered two heads above me, I forgot the why and the how. They had slipped from my mind like rapeseed, dispersing in a summer wind.
“You’re cutting it close, aren’t you?” Frank asked Joanne. He liked to be a little early for lunch to claim his usual table by the window. From it, he could see most of the dining room and the door to the kitchen. He didn’t like the hustle and bustle from the staff or the loud conversations from residents at other tables…
The sky had been clear and blue when Johnny left the pub that morning, the sun so bright his vision blurred as he transitioned from the darkness.
“The last pint might have been a mistake,” he said to nobody in particular as he zipped his windbreaker…
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.