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.

It’s October in British Columbia and unseasonably warm. This means it’s also hot in the cabin of the twin-prop Cessna carrying me northwest, so I twist out of my sweatshirt and squirm in my seat to find a comfortable way to sit. No success.
I’m on assignment for Outdoors, going to interview Diana Li at her vacation cabin up north.

You are moving forward! You are moving forward. You’re cruising down the road in your jeep, on the way to work. The leather seat is cool beneath you; the world that’s passing by is overcast, but the yards and flora surrounding the nearby houses are almost a fluorescent green. There was a thunderstorm the night before.

We danced on my porch on the night I buried my dad. My feet were bare against the weathered wood, smooth under my skin. My dress, black and wrinkled, shifted in the cool night air and I remembered my father holding me up to the sky above his head. My arms outstretched, face toward the sun and flying, flying.

JENGA, yes, JENGA and rain. Both are safe for all ages, right? At the beach, sheets of rain rather than rays of sunshine coating the beach. JENGA! Throw in a slumber party game, a few choice words, a little alcohol, nothing too severe: Pinot Grigio, and wait. Now add a little, no, a lot more rain, bingo! Problem solved, right?

Carson Rawlings, attorney for the late Miriam McShanahan for over twenty years, waited for Trapp to stop laughing at his mother’s burial request. Trapp sat dwarfing a brown leather chair across from his desk. Carson leaned forward, fingertips pressed together, hands tented, glaring at Trapp. Trapp continued giggling. Carson sighed. “I remember the hilarity of my own mother’s passing,” he said.

Amaryllis stood in the rain, squinting at the little blue dot on her phone that showed her location. The cracked screen was barely readable, and the rain didn’t help. It was the correct address all right, and nicer than where most auditions were held. The lobby was very warm and very posh, with doormen, a security desk, and turnstiles that allowed entry only when security pressed a button.

Marli finds a corpse resting at the bank of a river in the middle of the woods after school. She almost doesn’t see it hidden amongst the brush and the moss, but the dingy gray color of its sneakers sticks out underneath the vibrant autumn leaves. After cleaning off her Dana Scully glasses – and squinting for good measure – she’s certain that it is a corpse, and not a fresh one either.

It was raining loudly on the tiled roofs and on the concrete sidewalks and on the trees but quietly on the grass. “This rain doesn’t sound and smell like rain,” I said when I went back inside the garage. My brother made a mark on the wood and put back the short yellow pencil behind his right ear. I looked at the cigarette behind his left ear and waited for him to say something.

The nurse standing behind him tucked a strand of dark hair into her lavender hijab before grasping the rail on the back of his gurney. “Gib” Gibson and his surgeon had been discussing the modern hospital building that was under construction while they waited for an operating theatre here in the old one. The stony turrets and false battlements of this showy Victorian relic on the Montréal skyline would soon be put to some new purpose.

She lived alone in the woods.
As far as anyone knew, it was just nature beyond the Clifton Wilderness Park’s Welcome Center. Trees and mosquitos and dirt. What else was there to it? Hikers might enjoy the crisp air and momentary escape from their day-to-day life, which they termed “becoming one with nature.”

Every Friday, while co-workers are out for their weekly happy hour, Meg sits in bed, her ticket perched on her keyboard, combing through design ideas on the internet while the local newscaster announces lottery numbers. One at a time, the numbered table-tennis balls appear on the screen.

Edgar thought they’d travel in a chartered jet. He’d never flown on one before, but he knew the Company used them when they needed feet on the ground ASAP. Cantor Fitzgerald was the Company’s biggest client, generating millions in revenue each year, which he figured would make them charter worthy.

First, there was Roses. She met him more than 30 years ago, at her second research job. Now, when they saw each other, he always brought her a single rose.
Roses, 6:16 a.m.: “I know this: You and I belong together. We have a beautiful future before us.”
Then, there was Wine. She broke up with him when she was 36. That was 23 years ago.

The day he arrived started off as usual as any for Pru. It was late spring. She stood by the stove in the summer kitchen, boiling water to wash Miss Vena’s petticoats and undergarments. Old Janie, who worked at the Moffatts’ neighboring farm, sat at the large wooden table gossiping with Aunt Betty, Pru’s father’s sister, who was Miss Vena’s cook.

Max Toffer was pretty much everything I wanted to be. A newspaper columnist, an author of fiction and nonfiction, a devoted advocate of the First Amendment. He was from Philadelphia before he moved to New York to become a Greenwich Village institution at The Oracle. I learned all I knew about Toffer from the about-the-author paragraphs at the back of the novel of his I just finished

Logan began looking for his friends as he waited to make a left turn at the gate. The corporate headquarters stood behind a gleaming white iron fence that stretched for furlongs. He followed four black Navigators down the long-curved driveway.
The parade of cars stopped at the valet, which gave him time to scan for the one belonging to the people he knew.

“It is with some delicacy,” began the note that May had found that morning in the wastebasket in Theo’s study when she went in search of a scrap of paper, that I phrase this apol…” And there the script sputtered and ended. May knew exactly what had happened.

Byron shook the rain off his driving cap and wool blazer before he hung them on the rack by the entrance. He handed the chubby lady behind the front desk a twenty-dollar bill. She was honey-colored with glossy yellow fingernails and plump black and gold braids coiled atop her head like a nest of vipers. When she passed him his change and gave him a receipt she said, “That’s for them,” gesturing to the phalanx of barber students several feet away.

There lived a woman Alimona who was called so because her evil husbands had forced her to pay them alimony before they would agree to free her from their miserable reigns. Many, many evil husbands, too many to identify, lest you find her thoughtless or promiscuous, tortured Alimona’s good faith, good heart and good intentions.

One day, Grace Stevenson stopped coloring her hair. All those hours and all that money spent trying to keep aging at bay, and John had gone off with a younger woman anyway. What was the point? At seventy, she thought the gray made her look refined, worldly. That’s how she wanted to feel. Like she’d arrived at a certain stage in her life where her choices should be respected.
She knew she wasn’t fooling anyone.

They say the cave offers a passage to the underworld. In ancient Greek mythology, a musician, poet, and prophet named Orpheus, son of the god Apollo, descended through the cave into the subterranean kingdom of Hades in search of his beloved, Eurydice. There are many versions of this legend and none of them have happy endings.