Memories of America before the Great War distract my mind as Annalisa—my chief of staff—slides the after-dinner briefing book over the warm oak desktop before me. The picture of a woman at the border—draped in a red satin sheet holding a sign overhead reading “You’re no Obama”—rests just inside the cover of the materials. She catches my eye and confirms for me why the American experiment had to end. Or, at least, why the theory behind it had to deviate.

In the beginning, there is only darkness. Then light and water. From those three there are plants. From plants come fish – from fish, mammals, and eventually, humans. The first human awakes and rises and raises its head under the stars, and later, under the sun. Its bare feet wade through water, over rocks, sand, dirt, and then, grass. Its arms balance it upright as its outstretched fingers graze the trees.

Peter stands in front of the entrance to the Museum of Modern Art in the middle of a terrazzo plaza that is hit full-on by the Californian summer sun. Behind him cars rumble past, taxis honk and construction workers are operating a power drill. It is sweltering hot and he is sweating in direct proportion. He admonishes himself, silently, lips barely moving.

The first time I heard crying from the guest room in my new century home was moving day, three months ago. Woke me in the middle of the night. With the windows wide open to catch a breeze, it was hard to tell if it originated from inside or outside the house. Add to that an eight-hour drive, three hours directing movers, and too many pints at the local pub over dinner, and I thought I was hearing things.

He awoke. The sounds of the ocean in his ears, birds outside; dust motes swirled in shafts of sunlight. The scent of salt and resin, pine and decaying things. Another clear morning. He was going to die soon.

The soothsayer was right; she had told him exactly what was going to happen. He had observed the rituals, he’d kept the fires lit. He was wracked with the sheer injustice of it all. Why him?

Portia’s hiking stick tapped the ground. Gravel roiled underfoot; thoughts tumbled. Clouds opened and closed like curtains, blinkered the moon. Wind whipped, settled, blew up again. The woods bashed and ached a lively dance.

Too late to be out walking. What choice did she have? She had to escape Bill and Alda Edgerton, their unbearable conversation, and their daughter.

“This is a bad idea,” I say. “There are at least half a million better ways to spend a Saturday night.” A set of eyes thrown at my husband, inviting him to Netflix and Chill, goes unnoticed as he stands in my reflection. His perfection on full display, the long, lean muscles of his dark, ebony arms and legs meeting at the intersection where the white T-shirt and boxers cover his body. He tucks his T-shirt into his boxers which makes me smile, makes me want to wrap my arms around the elastic waistband and feel the tautness of his stomach against my face. And not let go.

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.

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.

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?”

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.

“I owe it all to Father Justus,” I muttered.
“Boys Town, 1938 …” answered Aeneas, my roommate. Aeneas was already fully dressed. Prep school blazer, snap-on bow tie, slacks and polished shoes were all in order. He sat at his desk, his back to me, no doubt working on some extra credit physics assignment. He looked up briefly and continued, “… but Mickey Rooney owed it all to Father Flanagan.”

“Pancreatic cancer” were not the two words I was expecting to think about today on my long drive home from the university hospital on other side of the state. I knew, of course, that something wasn’t quite right, but always, in the past, the something that was not quite right could be treated promptly and effectively with an antibiotic.

Jay ran away from her home in Salt Lake, Kolkata, at the age of seventeen. She had an abusive father and an absent mother. Her parents’ were relieved when she left as they had one less mouth to feed.

She moved to Bombay and began a career as a part-time actor and a yoga instructor. Life was looking up for her –

I was a child and already I could tell my dad was not paying attention the way he should. It was as if he had forgotten that living things grew. He forgot with my older brothers, lanky-limbed with pants that grew too short, leaving their bony ankles exposed. He forgot with me, my little girl body moving toward a brink of change that no one would explain to me.

You’ve got to trust me on this, but back in the early sixties they had a thing called drive-in movies. The movies were actually shown outdoors, after dusk, of course. You pulled your car into a spot where there was a speaker mounted on what looked like a parking meter, except that the parking meter part was a speaker you could detach and place in your car.

all that fairy dust dancing inside your beer stein and yet you don’t believe in magic?

this incredible blast of light from the sun, ninety-two-point-ninety-five million miles from our planet, fragments through the surface of a stream and appears as shimmering waves streaking across your feet, and you still say you don’t believe in magic?

When I find the counselor waiting for me in the hallway on Sunday morning, I know something bad has happened. “Hello again, Miss Campbell,” she says when I’ve come near enough to hear her. “Could we talk in the lounge for a few minutes?”

The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. She jerks her head up with a start and sees the clock–9:40 a.m. There just might be time! There just might be time if Nancy runs fast enough, time to see John and confess her love for him. She has been working on a proof all night and has fallen asleep at her desk and is late, is late, for a very important date,

Gooooooooooood morning Woodfield! This is Kap Freeman with your drive time weather update. It’s gonna be HOT again today! [cue: sizzling bacon sfx] Mostly sunny with a High of 92, heat indexes creeping into the triple digits. Continuing into this evening with tonight’s low only getting down to 81. [cue: loud barfing sfx] Then HOT again tomorrow!

The headland rises before the horizon like a giant lion’s paw, sun bleached and golden. Morning mist lifts above it in a soft mantilla of grey gossamer. You can just hear the breakers over the heavy equipment, the banging of gears and the blades of the bulldozers scarring the earth.