Malia wrapped her fingers around the steering wheel. A foggy feeling enveloped her, the same as it had every day this past year. Pushing through the heaviness of insomnia was a daily battle. Highway 406 stretched further than either she or her son John could see. She tried to remember the last time she and her family traveled this highway, but her recollection was interrupted by the pounding in her ears.

“What does it mean to be African American?”
“Why do you ask that question?”
“At school, Sister Gracilda had me fill out a form and she told me to put a check mark next to the word ‘African American.’ Am I African American? What is an African American?”
“It means persons with African blood. Or better put, someone with African genes. Sometimes they’re also called Black.”
“Am I Black?”

The town of Curly had a single billboard, a faded, wind-wavering sign welcoming motorists to the Sandhills town of two hundred and forty-seven residents. There had been a complementary billboard on the opposite edge of town, but a twister had churned through decades ago, obliterating the sign.

The worst thing about my condition was the insomnia, the inability to get a good night’s sleep. I would go to bed early in the evening, exhausted by the torments of the day, and would promptly fall asleep, but by three o’clock in the morning I was fully awake again.

I refused to greet silver-haired mourners or point teary-eyed people toward the casket or absorb touching stories about Mona. Instead, I stayed glued to a metal folding chair at the front of the room, twirling my hair, staring at my mother’s waxy, shriveled body.

Delwyn nodded to the woman as he walked from his allocated parking space. She was leaning against a directional sign, her legs crossed at the ankles in a pose of inappropriate insouciance, a cigarette paused between her fingers, her face wreathed in a fine gray ash. He thought it unseemly for women to smoke and certainly not a good look for the hospital.

Robbie Crossman was five when his mother, Sally May, told him Bible stories, but her stories were different than those he heard in Sunday School. Instead of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, her stories were about Robbie himself and his parents. Even at a young age, he knew the place they lived wasn’t Judea; it was Indiana, and Indiana was in America.

I had a reputation for having a surly temperament. The surliness was a defense to the constant beratement from my father and his group at the club. I kept being told I was wrong, but I knew better. They were wrong. They lived in a wealthy bubble, protected from the real world where problems wandered the streets and seeped into the homes and apartments…

Levi woke up to the insistent sound of his alarm. It had the same rhyming beat as always, but for some reason, it sounded louder this morning, as though he had woken up for the first time in his life.

He sat up, stretching his back until he felt a satisfying pull in his shoulders. At thirty-five years old, his body ached in places that were vaguely familiar. By the time he’d made coffee, his thoughts drifted to his day ahead.

I divide my life into two parts: before Hiland Mountain and after. The time between I don’t dwell on much. Why should I? It was as bleak as Eagle River’s sky in November, a granite dome strung with nimbus clouds that blocked all light and yielded only biting rain and hail. Through the steel bars, the land around the facility was covered with a thin layer of frost and ice, where off in a distant and unattainable horizon a few dots hinted at Anchorage city life.

It was a bright afternoon. Sunlight fell across the benches and paths, making the leaves glow in green and gold. Angelique sat on a bench near the lake, one leg crossed over the other, hands folded on her lap. An older man was beside her, gray-haired and stooped, speaking slowly about hatred. He spoke as though he had carried it all his life and expected to carry it always.

My siblings and I all committed to a biking tour together in Puglia, Italy, almost a year before its mid-May start date. The main reason was a joint celebration of significant milestones for each of us at the time. I was the oldest brother and was turning seventy, and our lone sister, Alice, sixty-five. Pete, two years my junior, had just successfully survived head/neck cancer plus a rash of aftermath complications. And Tom, the youngest, had formalized his upcoming early retirement at age sixty-one.

A flickering neon sign reading “A-R-T” on a dark Culver City street was the only indication that Arcturus Gallery was open. Steep concrete steps led to a basement-level space. He nearly slipped on a rain-slicked slab—it never rains in LA—before landing in a small puddle in front of a smudged glass door.

Cursing as damp seeped through thin socks, he pushed through the portal. Bells jangled announcing his entry into the art gallery, as though it was a convenience store.

The cell phone’s ring pierced through the Christmas music like a needle into a vein. I sputtered from my baking nirvana and glanced at the screen, already aware by the ringtone that the caller wasn’t my husband or our daughters’ school but still a number I’d stored. When I saw that it was the oldest granddaughter of Helen, my sweet neighbor, I set my frosting bag down and tapped a pinky fingertip to the green button.

“Nikki, thank God you’re home. It’s Rachel. We need your help.”

It was my third cruise in three summers, and I still could not get used to the cramped, windowless living situation that followed me onto every boat. I guess if I wanted to, I could have always splurged on a better room, but that always made things more than twice the price, and without the shitty room, it hardly even felt like a cruise.

I borrowed this attitude mostly from my wife, who did not enjoy cruises very much at all, and only came when I insisted.

Home after a long, hard day at work, Pieter Bakkes took a quick shower, pulled on some civvies, turned on the television, switched on the news, grabbed the day’s newspaper from an end table, and plopped down on the couch in his family’s living room. When a commercial about Lion Lager came on, he hopped up and headed into the kitchen to get a cold bottle of the beer.

Tuesday night, a group of sicarios abducted Juan José Juárez, his wife, and two children in Colonia Los Duendes. Drugs and weapons were found in a bunker hidden behind the living room of the suburban house, tying Juárez to the Baja Cartel. Joaquín Velasco, a neighbor, is also missing.
“Joaquín went to play video games with Manuel, the youngest son,” María Velasco, Joaquín’s mother, explained. “He played over there all the time. We had no idea of Juan Manuel’s drug trafficking. We’d known them for years.”

Leo positioned the stylus gently on the vinyl record, delighting in the peculiar little crackle signifying the start. The inexpensive turntable was his first purchase when he arrived in New York, and it made his dorm room cozier. He swung his legs up on the bed and pillowed his hands behind his head. A piano, followed by a violin, playing “Yo Soy Maria” by Piazzolla, an Argentinian composer.

I’ve spent weeks painting these walls. Spent weeks painting this shack, inside and out. Spent weeks, now, learning this place: this house, this garden, this street, this town. Already, I’ve memorised the view from the end of my road: a ravaged curve of mountainous coast crooked around the edge of the bay; a bay that opens out to the ocean; an ocean that pours into the southern hemisphere which makes up the bottom half of this godforsaken world.

Mike was mean as a snake, except when she decided she wasn’t. Then she was sweet as pie. She could be an in-between kind of nice too, but that was mostly for waitresses and old ladies and neither of us ever found that very interesting. Mike was beautiful, stunning actually, and understood the leverage this gave her with both sexes, though it was the advantage she pressed least.

A second weather alert convinces Mary Carruci, the executive director of Camp Rapture, to shine her flashlight at the rain pelting the river. Crossing a puddle in sneakers, shorts and a tank top, she tilts her umbrella toward the wind and heads from her office to the road, where lightning reveals the river’s steady flow. She follows the asphalt up to the bridge and stops breathing when a sheet of water rounds the bend and skirts the river’s surface.

Marilyn’s sharpest memories were shaped like five in the morning, dark silhouettes moving across a cold house with curved, sleep-deprived back and cyclical possibilities. Her mother in this same house, padding through the kitchen in her thick socks as she packed. Coffee in the thermos, breakfast in the pail. She kept her boots outside the door, and Marilyn watched her from the loft in their little A-frame house, her body wedged between two of her brothers in the bed they all shared.

Color, like life, can be enigmatic. It often attracts, frequently lulls, and sometimes tricks one into assuming one thing while the opposite is actually in play. Take the lush carpet that covers so much of the jungle floor throughout Cambodia. Its mesmerizing greens of sugar palms and high grass seemingly mingle innocently with purple cockscombs, yellow rumduol, and red hibiscus. One would surely think such beauty is indicative of the peace and serenity that resides there.

Boisterous cab drivers, chewing betel, buzzed around the queue at the pre-paid taxi counter of Agra Cantonment Railway Station, detailing the attractions of Agra to tourists. Shipra strutted across the station facade, halting the crawling taxis with her outstretched hand, before joining her father in the queue. Her poise and ease generated the impression of a native used to honking scooters and howling taxi drivers.