As always, Monday morning hit me like a shock wave, rudely interrupting whatever dreams I was having. The dreams rarely left me with detailed memories, only a few faint glimpses of somewhere I had never been and people I hardly knew.

This year’s Welcome back meeting following the summer break was different. It included a detailed presentation on Generation A.I. Looking around the auditorium, it seemed many other teachers were anxious too. This was our first and only official orientation for this new generation of students.

I’m Theo. I’m seven.
Me, my mom, my Dad, and my sister Ava, we’re in the doctor’s office. The talk doctor.
Mom and Dad are sitting on the shiny blue couch. It made a squeaky sound when they sat down. Ava’s between them. She’s eight. She’s wearing bell-bottoms, just like Mom. She even has a mood ring, just like Mom. She thinks she’s so grown up.

My name is Henry Wadsworth. Most prisoners call me Hank. I am proud of that moniker. Rare is the prison wherein there are any guards not loathed by the inmates. To be called Hank means I am an exception, one of the good guys, known to be decent and fair. It’s because I’m a man of faith. I don’t proselytize, though. The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. I don’t force my faith on others. I think that’s why the prisoners like me.

I fell in love for the first time during the summer of ‘94. It was the summer before my senior year of high school, the same summer Sammy Davis played baseball for the Vermont Expos. He wore Mickey Mantle’s old number seven and manned his old position, center field. The Mick was Dad’s favorite player. Dad grew up west of the Mississippi in the fifties, so he bled Cardinal red. Stan Musial, Bob Gibson, and Enos Slaughter were his Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I was admitted through the ED to a step-down unit shortly before midnight on a rainy late July Thursday. My wife, Gwen, had driven me there because of increasing gut pain, but upon intake it was noted that I also had significantly low heart rate and blood pressure. Initial tests provided no immediate explanation for any of the conditions, but because the pain became sufficiently intense that they had to administer a low dose of morphine…

I was just a tiny feral kitten when I lost my mother. She went to fetch food like she did every day. My siblings and I would wait on the porch of a house whose family was always traveling. It was freezing more than usual that evening. The loud noises from the roads made us crouch in fear. Then, I heard this screeching sound followed by a door opening and slamming in the street near the house’s porch. I listened to a woman’s cry of anguish.

Exactly three weeks, six days, seven hours, and forty-two minutes before his sixth birthday, Nathan Front announced to his mother that he was going to die. They had ground to a halt on the road that overlooked the coastline.

On April 26th, 1949, Selma Stern married the wrong man, a circumstance she compulsively complained about, as though Morris Wort, an otherwise infuriately passive individual had grabbed her by the arm, dragged to City Hall, and forced a judge to unite them before her fiancé, a demigod stuck in traffic, could intervene.

Waves of people swarm the sidewalks like the waves in the nearby ocean, and it is always hot. Shoppers, families, delivery boys, phone addicts, lost souls, tourists, girls of the night clearly in their early mornings and more. They all look the same…

I compel myself to think, even if every stream of thought seems to pool only into misery.
I’ve had too much time on my hands since we arrived in Rexdale — settled down in a barren basement where I thought our dreams would take form.

Howard’s wife was talking about the yard again, before his breakfast, that back forty he’d bought when the Fishers moved away. She didn’t want him to clear it, said she’d spotted some special flower. Weed, more likely. Fond of wasteland, Fay was – stumps and berries.

Ada walked through their neat front garden, which looked as unremarkable as yesterday. The front door key still fit in the lock, and she let the keychain dangle a moment. She unbuttoned her brown coat then bent to dust off her trousers and retie a lace in her leather shoes. Her wristwatch said it had only been twenty-four hours.

Marco Merletti came from a long line of magicians. His mother Talma was a noted mentalist from the old country, capable of convincing the Tuscan villagers of her inscrutable powers of clairvoyance. The moment her searing brown eyes alighted on a young woman’s tearful face or an old man’s trembling white handkerchief, she knew who had been the mistress of whom, who was to give birth and why and countless other secrets the country people thought were their own.

Sophia built her first shrine when she was six years old. She took a fragment of a fallen bird’s nest, decorated it with dandelions and acorn shells, and surrounded it with a circle of stones on the surface of a tree stump in her backyard. The tree had come down very recently, and she’d been staring out the window at the place where it used to be. No one had taught her to build this shrine; she had no word for what she was doing.

The water began to rise from the soil three days after the storm passed. By then, the rest of the valley and the neighboring town had become feverish again with the heat of early summer, and all remnants of rain had completely disappeared. It was a thing of magic, the townspeople said when they finally drove the five miles into the lowlands of the valley to see it with their own eyes. Water seeping from the depths of the earth.

Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.

To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.

The hospital department chiefs hold monthly meetings in a conference room. The room has a high ceiling and tall windows. The walls are made of mahogany panels. There are large portraits of previous medical school deans on the wall. All of them are men in dark suits and black bow-ties, each holding either a pen or a book in their hands, looking straight ahead with an air of importance.

Derry was my best friend, but that was a long time ago.
Since then, I built my career while Derry played in a band. I saved for retirement and Derry saw the world. And when I bought a house, Derry was still burning through a revolving door of roommates. Derry always used to say, “Sam… you’re the Yin to my Yang.”