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.

I sat up from my coffin as the church bells began to ring. My tiny mausoleum remained much the same as the night before: the stone slab of my coffin sat turned at an angle, allowing me to sit up and take my evening walkabouts. Dead leaves and detritus littered the floor, mingling with mouse droppings, spiders, and the refuse of nature that wind blows into such spaces.

Beck watched fat freckles and swelling blisters burgeon across her girlfriend’s face and shoulders on their seventh day stranded in their emergency dinghy. A speck lost somewhere on the Pacific Ocean.
On the first night, as the adrenaline from the crash ebbed, Beck watched Bea’s eyes grow heavy before slumping against the stiff, inflated side of the dinghy. Beck tried to rid her girlfriend of the shivers coursing through her body as the temperature plummeted, but it was no use.

Pancho grew up in Texas, which accounts for the name he assumed. Franz was born and raised in Baltimore, which doesn’t. They met at college somewhere in the Midwest, where Pancho majored in narcissism, and Franz, in egocentricity.
Pancho and Franz had one strong trait in common, a characteristic that drew them to one another, bonded them such that they became inseparable — and that was self-love.

Her phone buzzed: Lia pulled it out of her pocket to check the incoming message, expecting a meme, or a friend sending pictures from her latest walk. It was not. “I was there this morning: she’s refusing to take her meds, and she’s yelling at the nurses again. Called the doctor a benchod.” It was a message in the family group chat.

The sun blazes overhead. Jenny, like a Butoh dancer in meditative motion, turns the wheel with slow, deliberate grace. The car glides silently along the winding road. Inside, the AI-controlled A/C keeps her cool and comfortable. She no longer resists the heat. Her mind is vacant now.
Suddenly, she grips the wheel and swerves right. Her car merges onto a narrow road canopied by towering oaks.

Kabir stood on Agatti Island, staring at the ocean. The water was a perfect blend of blue and green. Turquoise blue. No, turquoise green. Kabir couldn’t decide which one. He glanced at the green stone on his ring. Then, he noticed the swell of the waves crashing against the shore. The water appeared blue.

It was day one in uncharted territory. The rules of the experiment were simple. He was to spend 30 days alone in a cabin in the woods without access to the outside world. If the man were to step outside of the cabin before the end of the 30th day, then the experiment would be deemed a failure, and he would go home with, at best, only a fraction of the money he was promised, depending on how long he could make it.