The river was wide and moving at a brisk clip. Its dark, choppy surface ran past desolate sandy banks suggesting some barren shore. Sad trees with anemic branches could be seen reaching out desperately in all directions. In the distance low rolling hills seemed to wait listlessly for a defiant sprout of green to break through their hard, stubborn soil.

The blood spatter covered his face and arms where the worn T-shirt left his skin exposed. Tiny red dots, slowly drying in the August heat. The infant in his arms gurgled happily while Phillip fed him in the back seat of his wife’s car, bloody fingerprints covering the sweating glass of the baby bottle.

She decided to take the tour of the Black Creek Indian Mounds because she thought it might be a good way to get out of the house. The divorce was over a year old, and her therapist said it would be a good idea to get out there—not “out there” in the sense of being a divorced woman who’s out there, but “out there” in the sense of not sitting around her living room watching old reruns of Everybody Loves Raymond or clicking through endless loops of pictures on social media sites.

The village wraps its way around the hill and back down. At the top is a shack, wooden slats painted white and a window thick with condensation. Hanging in the centre is the sign. Casino. Fluorescent and too bright against the open trees and grey sky.

On the exit ramp, the cake slides off the back seat. The cakebox, now wedged on the floor, requires both hands and some wriggling to remove it from the car. Looking through the cellophane, now crinkled and dented, Lori sighs. The thick gelatin-like blue and yellow balloons piped along the cake’s edges have slithered and slid across the stiff white frosting into the number seventy.

“Start that over, Tiny Bit,” says Grandmama as she waves an unsnapped green bean at my laptop. “And turn it up for me.”
My finger is still hovering over the touchpad when a wave of crisp, staccato horns crests and crashes from the speakers, receding into violins cascading
down,
down,
into a churning drumroll before that voice smooths the way and invites us to meander a piece down a lazy river.

When we were young, my brother Jim once tried to mail a pigeon – a live pigeon, friends – to his girlfriend. There it is. A week or two before school resumed for what was to be his junior year, he had captured it under a laundry basket in an alley behind our house near where the garbage cans dwelt at the rear of the garage. Over much pecking and scratching, Jim had managed to band a love note around one of its legs

The fat gibbous moon is hours away from dropping beneath the curved horizon. Under that fat moon Nana-Wai glides through her garden, ghostlike. She’s old and there’s not as much of her as there was when she was younger. Her cotton shift, thinned with age and wear, like gossamer wafts in the breeze. It’s as if she is floating. Stiff bones and muscles find grace.

My mother tucked the phone receiver between her shoulder and her ear, lit a cigarette and simultaneously dialed Aunt Rachel’s number.
I left home several years ago, but I’ve overheard enough of these phone calls to be able to recount this conversation. While they lived only two blocks apart and neither of them worked outside the home, my mother and my Aunt Rachel found enough drama in their lives to need to speak to each other every day.

All the cars are gone except for two. Fearing he’s been left behind or got the day wrong, the leggy Catholic-school boy with blue eyes and string-cheese hair limps up to the dirt lot in tattered Chuck Taylors and a sweaty panic. It’s Wednesday, August 13, 1975, and a hundred degrees.

Brigitte could not remember a time before the suitcase flanked the front door on the right, opposite the coat closet to the left. Just like the faded floral wallpaper, the yellowed silhouettes of the stair-step Schmidt sisters, and the frosted glass sconces in the foyer, no one even seemed to notice the weathered hard-shell Samsonite anymore.

Eight men stood in a loose group on the edge of the Nubava atoll swinging wide their arms and slapping their leathery brown torsos in the cool air as they waited for the first glimmer of the sun. Thirty feet out, a horseshoe of small boats bobbed up and down, weighted fishing nets strung down between them to create a barrier against the open sea.

Debra is at the cemetery again reading to Martin’s dead wife. She reads the kinds of literature Martin says Annika enjoyed before the brain tumor: children’s books, the poetry of Robert Frost and James Dickey, novels of psychological suspense. Her startling enunciation, musical and evocative, lifts the words into the air where they linger like butterflies hovering in mid-flight, her rich, clear soprano a storyteller’s gift.

I’m sixty-two years old. Like most my age, I suppose, there are a number of things I regret. For some reason, one occupies a particular place for me. It’s not the most significant or memorable in my life, or even very notable in and of itself. But, when I think of it, something different falls in me, something irretrievable.

When I woke up, I knew it was an emergency room. This was back in 1958, and it looked like scenes in Young Dr. Kildare on Million Dollar Movie.
“Take it easy, Kiddo,” I heard my father say, as I tried to sit up. He was hunched on a stool next to my bed, with an unlit cigarette clenched in the corner of his mouth.

Jay Rowland died on May 5, 2020. His name was listed between Olga Masterson and Stefan Stuart in a Herald News story entitled, “Area Nursing Homes Ravaged by Coronavirus.”

Jay’s nickname was “Dog Ears.”

December 1990
She heard Ruth lock the front door behind them. In the hall Fiona caught the smell of varnish, a hint of juniper and that human odour of someone else’s home. It felt like warmth was barred from leaving, winter kept outside and the rest of her evening secure in the heat of those rooms. She set her bag down and Ruth helped her out of her coat without offering – her friend never waited for permission to be considerate.

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.

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.