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.

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…