“There is no permanent self,” he’d whispered louder than he’d intended. It was only in that moment he finally became aware of himself, what he was doing, and that he never meant to say anything out loud at all.

Beyond the tracks and rising erumpent from the swallows of the Mississippi are two Maple trees which he watches alone and with a face not older than the trees but one of a similar mold. He pulls out a red lighter and a pack of Lucky Strikes from his leather jacket. He spins the wheel twice before the flame emerges, an orange haze in the gray evening.

Kathleen glanced around the sterile chrome and white setting while clutching the tablet in her hands. She had been here once before for the preliminary, complimentary consultation, and it had been just as silent. A big screen TV mounted in the corner played a midday soap on mute with the captions scrolling across the bottom. The receptionist typed her notes in swift, almost clackless rhythm.

Ms. Elizabeth Brockridge was as sharp as a tack. As an attorney, she never missed a trick in the courtroom or anywhere else in her life. Of course, she had to be, because she did not have much else going for her in the beginning. Her parents had nothing but a small farm they could barely pay the taxes on, and when it came to her education she was largely on her own. She showed all the naysayers, though.

A pickup truck slammed into our car killing my wife instantly. The drunk driver who ran the red light also died at the scene.
The accident was so random and the loss so devastating, I could barely comprehend it. Reacting without reason and not knowing what else to do, I sued. Even though the drunk driver had a family, they were not the object of the lawsuit, so I could take out my vindictiveness on the insurance company. I was not interested in a settlement—we went to court.

“We’ll be getting a new store manager soon.”
“We will?”
“Yep, it’s coming on”–Rusty swiveled his chair and peered at the calendar on the wall–“ten months. They ain’t ever here for more than a year.”
“Why’s that?”
“Beats me, Luke. Someone told me it’s so they don’t get too attached to us. The same reason farmers don’t give their hogs names. Just makes it more difficult when it comes time to…” Rusty drew a finger across his throat.

She shifts to her side. On her thighs are tiny marks, the size of pinpricks, her battle scars. Faded but still visible are the blue Xs on her ass that her husband Steve draws with a blue marker he uses as a guide for the hypodermic he uses to give her the injection with. According to schedule, he fills her with the cocktail and afterward, full of medication that is supposed to make her ovulate, it begins. That night like all the others these days, with the invading chemicals swimming in her, she suffers psychedelic Clomid dreams.

The plan was simple, the execution a bit tricky, but I was ready. Man, was I ready. Or maybe I was tired of trying to figure out what might go wrong. I just wanted to get going. We’d certainly spent enough time puzzling over the damn details.

Toshihiro arrived at the Osakako station fifteen minutes earlier than planned. As he left the subway, he realised the sun had already set while he was underground, making him feel as if he travelled to a place more distant.

Malawach, the bubbly Yemenite pancake bread oozing with meat and vegetables, bloated the teachers’ American bellies, as the tour bus spirited them away from the trendy restaurant to the terraced sidewalks of Jerusalem’s Tayelet.

I don’t remember if this was before or after the fumigator accidentally lit our house on fire in 2002, which turned out to be sort of a mixed bag in the long run, but I have this picture in my head where Bunny is running toward me down a hallway and then she’s in my arms,

“Dad,” someone was saying. “Dad. DAD!” And now poking, he noted. “Yeah. OK,” he said, lifting his head from his arms. “This place is disgusting,” his daughter told him. “Well, daughter mine,” James muttered. “Of all the gin joints you could have found me in … at least this is a gin joint.”

Alois, the caretaker of Vultures’ Nest, wears bush clothes and drives his old safari truck 200 kilometers into the northern suburbs of Johannesburg to get presents to send back to his family in Zimbabwe. In the parking lot of the Mall of Africa he drives his rusty truck between bulletproof black BMWs. Children keep their distance from him and a trendy mother thinks he is a parking attendant and tosses him a few coins. Sparse brick workspaces surround the parking lot, where self-important businessmen stride along selfishly, yelling and arguing into the air.

High above the farmlands of northeastern Oklahoma, above the red dirt roads and the swaying cottonwoods, atop the flat-peaked mesas that make up the Glass Mountains, lives a clan of moon worshipping off-gridders who harvest the selenite crystals and perform human sacrifices while dancing naked beneath the deep pull of a blood moon, their bodies bathed in the rich, sunburnt soil of the land, wailing like a pack of rabid wolves on a midnight hunt. Of course, those were the stories, the whispers passed from lip to ear on the school playground. Tales to sizzle the blood and raise the neck hair. Images to transform the heart into a bass drum, the fear into the mallet that beats against it.

I look out the dirty, cracked window toward the road, hoping to see her there; her slim figure, bundled and shivering, hurrying home. But the road is empty save for the brown leaves carried by the wind across the way. Honey’s been gone for three days. That’s unlike her. A pickup doesn’t take three days. I lay back on the hard floor; the air is cold and seeps through the cracks in the windows. The walls are marred with graffiti. Honey and I added our own names to the collection of red and black obscenities and drawings when we found this place, ‘Oscar ♥ Honey,’ big and sloppy, smeared over the wall’s cracks and chips. I look out the window again, squinting to see if I can make her out in the distance, but no one is there.

They stand in the archway at the back of the chapel, watching the prisms of light as they pass through the stained glass and dance on the old wooden floors. It had taken some effort, but Jeannie had picked the least flashy church she could find. She wasn’t aiming for somber, but she needed dignified. She places her hand on her father’s arm, feeling the cool starchiness of his dress whites as he stands ramrod straight, his seventy-five years not yet bowing his body.

Melanie recognized Paula’s extension, and exhaled sharply. She smoothed her voice the way a widow adjusts her dress during an unseasonably hot funeral. “Hi, Paula.” Sincere but solemn. “Melanie, hi. Mark can’t do the trip. Jim wants you to come.” Melanie, after ten years as a diplomat, had the grace not to offer her opinion of what Jim did or didn’t want, but her forehead made a graceful arc onto her keyboard.

I think I used to lucid dream. More precisely, I’ve lost count. The dreams were flint-sparks at first: I awoke in my sleep a few nights in a row but was quickly blotted out. The first full-length lucid dream was in a movie-theater. I was alone. A movie-projector was being projected on-screen. The movie projector on-screen was projecting the very screen on which it was being projected.

Apart from the usuals who wandered in and out to sift through old records the shop was unusually quiet. Marcel, the sales clerk, was leaning back on the brick wall behind the register, rolling a joint between his fingers. He took the fixings, rolled, licked, and twisted, then placed the cigarette in his mouth. The rose-colored tip glowed gold as his thumb stroked the wheel of the lighter, before browning, and turning black. He stared out the display window as he smoked. The evening sky was a pure, uninterrupted pink…

Corina settled back into the grimy seat and tucked white buds into her ears. Chicago flashed past her in snatches of skyscrapers, cars, bridges, and billboards promoting Krazy Kaplans’ fireworks. More would come as they drew closer to the fourth of July. She drummed her fingers on her knee to the beat of her mixed playlist. It was supposed to help her feel more empowered and energetic. Normally it did, but not today. Today was a bad day, and the familiar torn poster clinging to the metro train wall across from her didn’t help.

The floor creaked in the hall outside my bedroom at 3:20 in the morning, and shortly after that, the doorknob quietly turned. I had a Louisville slugger in my hands and a hundred-pound dog snoring next to my bed. On the other side of the door was Mike Harper, a childhood friend who had suffered a mental breakdown, thought mobsters were after him, was carrying a large knife and pining away for Adeline, a woman he hadn’t seen in a dozen years.

Over the past three years Queenie Reginald Smith had been arrested more times than she cared to admit. Recently she even managed to get herself arrested on Sixth and Howard Streets at four o’clock in the morning by trying to solicit an undercover cop she saw leaning against the entrance to The Tip Top Donut Shop. After she was taken to Juvenile Hall, Queenie assumed that Judge Williamson would release her from custody the way all judges did, given her youth and the prevailing view that her kind of crime did not warrant custody time. Judge Williamson, however, was not like all other judges.

He could not see anything, nor was there any sound. He knew he was moving forward and could feel the soft squish of the ground underneath his feet. Because of the void he did not know if his path was narrow or if he walked in an expanse. He held his arms out in front of him and then waved them in the air at his sides but felt nothing. He felt like he was walking in the right direction yet was not sure if the next step he took would plunge him over the precipice and into the abyss. He was not sure that he would have minded that but didn’t think that was what was going to happen.

Rummaging through the evening’s profile and its many lit sunsets – on the pavement, in the shadows, in the alleys, on the shore – Iqra had a keen sensation of what it felt like to be in love. She felt the dual nature of reality – one, in which she existed with him, and the other in which she was part of the ordinary world – come in close contact when she realized that she had not answered either his phone, or the work-meet. Lost in the contemplation of nature she had let time slip by and the announcement it made on her life was evocative, fulfilling. She realized that both Tahir and Usman would be upset with her. She had missed birthday calls, engrossed in the setting sun.