Fiona, nude, sweaty and spent, tries to block out the voices in her gut and in her mind screaming, don’t go back to Tucker, because he’s gonna beat you black and blue.

In the yard on a Tandoor clay oven, Mrs. Hassan cooked dumplings. She stared absentmindedly into the pot at the small lumps of dough that stared back at her like bulging eyes from behind a veil of rising steam.

Leaning over the kitchen counter, Allison watches the sun rise over the eastern plains of Iowa and lets her mind wander: The beginning of another week. End of summer. Beginning of fall.

Sand ground into my shoulder blades. Scratch scratch on aluminum. I opened my eyes to a sky white on white. I blinked. Blue clouds with yellow edges. Against the hull of the canoe, lake water rocked and licked.

Arkansas Department of Correction: Grimes Unit, 2000
The inmates leaned on their shovel handles and gazed up the long, sloping fairway. The man in a clerical collar and black shirt stood on the tee box.
“Ostrich?” one inmate whispered.
“No. Lower body is too skinny. Stork?”
“I got it. Praying mantis.”

The days were long and yellow and the heat thick as syrup. Ron was itchy in his work clothes, plump now because Joan cooked so well. His heaviness and the strokes in his face had people he didn’t know calling him Mister or Sir. It was funny. Only a few years ago, he was slim and rigid.

Lindsey’s family was heading to San Francisco to celebrate her father’s journalistic achievement at an honorary luncheon, but she had other plans. She kept this to herself as they piled onto BART, her sister and parents whooping when they found three empty seats in a sea of Oakland Raiders jerseys.

Nobody wears flip-flops in the middle of December, but when Luca called at two in the morning, they were the only shoes I could find. I stood shivering in the street outside his house in my pajamas with a fleece thrown on top, my toes turning red.

Erik received the news of Pappa’s death in the summer of 1979 while he was away teaching philosophy courses at a study abroad program in Paris.

The storm swept up a week’s worth of clouds and binned them far to the east into the sea. Tanya stood in the doorway, surveying her yard. Cool mountain air entered her lungs—though she lived far from any mountain—and the sky was clear and blue.

—Come here. Closer. I know you love a good story, but the thing is…this is a long story…no, it’s not even a story…it’s a complete fugazi!

The Bourbon Restoration had a dark cool ambiance and friendly young servers and was a hit with local professionals. No matter that its name evoked antediluvian attitudes. After a couple of visits, Chuck Sullivan decided it was his favorite place to go after work.

Tom Cuthbert opened his garage door. A light snow topped the denuded branches of his crabapples and lay like a pale gauze over his yard. Winter’s depressing, steely-hued clouds clung tenaciously to the lake and its surroundings, still chafed about the warm air that had broken their hold a few weeks earlier.

In front of the door of her building, Maria’s male black cat Dash is waiting for Steve’s cuddles. Steve lifts Dash up and kisses him on the head. Dash allows it.
— This thing could kill me, he says, and Maria knows Steve means Dash, as usual.
Steve places Dash back on the ground. Dash disappears behind the brick wall surrounding Maria’s garden. Maria and Steve go inside. Apparently, Steve is allergic to Dash.

When her uncle came to visit from Florida, he brought a bagful of shells.
“Look at you! How big you’ve gotten! C’mere, c’mere! Give your Uncle Glenn a big hug! Aren’t you glad to see your Uncle Glenn?”
Her siblings (“half-stepsiblings,” as her mother joked about her confusion over the distinction between stepsiblings and half-siblings) were jealous that he gave her the big conch shell, but her Uncle Glenn had said that she was the youngest, so she would appreciate it the most.

I was born naked, but I got dressed up as soon as I could. Mom teased me about that when I was a kid. When I chose a fringed flapper dress for my first day of school, she rolled her eyes at my Miss Priss personality. She was a single mother, just starting out in the practice of law, had put herself through law school. And she didn’t work for some fancy-pants law firm. She was a public defender, so she didn’t have time or money for frills.

Two women walk in tandem down a cobblestoned street, one of many radiating like the veins of an emerald-green tree leaf from the metro down through the park towards a museum. The park is lined by elegant two-story mansions with beautiful balconies.
Children mount small horses inside the park in a corral of sorts, their moms adjust their helmets, while Daddy snaps pictures.

It’s six years since I was last home. It’s funny how quickly you can forget yourself. London is a long way from the village in Limerick where I spent one August as a teenager. We used to go a lot when I was a small boy, but I couldn’t remember it very well. But it wasn’t until I was fifteen that it became a part of me. Until then, I never wanted to visit family. It was summer after all, I should have been with friends, but my mother made me go.

They say that the characters in a movie are affected by the developments the screenwriter creates between each of them, and that these characters are influenced by the paths taken within the plot. I envied characters that said or did things on the screen that they would never do in real life. In some ways, my life, or existence, was like a movie script—adventures sprouting up unexpectedly over many episodes.