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.

James was running on the treadmill in time to the quick tempo music blasting in his ears. He was interrupted by an incoming text that lit up his phone sitting in the machine cradle.
Hi, I’m coming to NYC this weekend. Dinner?
Maddy.

Nitin Gharpure eases his Mercedes along the curb in the alley behind the warehouse. At the end of the alley, a semi is going beep-beep-beep, backing into a loading ramp, aligning a forty-foot container to the dock. And behind that, delicate tendrils of pink are forming over the distant Oakland hills.

It was Tuesday afternoon, on what should have been just another day of service for the Customs Patrol.
Sergeant Baxter of Southern District Airport’s Customs and Vetting Division was nearly ready to wrap up his shift. It had been quiet, this one. He’d normally hit his quota by the first few hours, after which he could busy himself with paperwork or checking out for anyone else he could justify not letting in.

My friend Alex was twelve years old when it happened. Years later, he told me it was like time had stopped the instant his father parked the car on top of the railroad tracks on Spring Street, pulled the keys from the ignition and tossed them out the window. I’ve always imagined Alex, his mother, and his younger sister looking at each other in stunned silence as the father closed his eyes and calmly surrendered to the universe, which he believed had defeated him at every turn.

The riot gate clangs behind me as I stride down the wide concrete hallway, nodding to passing officers and inmates. At a little over six feet tall and still carrying my fighting weight of 230 pounds, I know the inmates and even some of the newer officers find my size and demeanor intimidating. I try to soften my serious demeanor—bolstered by my icy-blue eyes and square jaw—by wearing my Yogi Bear tie with my usual black slacks and white dress shirt. My “uniform,” as my wife, Trula, calls it.

With every passing Christmas, my sons and their families spend less and less time in the house before hurrying back to their own homes. I will not see them again until the next Christmas, when they will reluctantly come again to honor the childhood promise that they made on their mother’s deathbed: to always keep in touch. Only then will the house see some life, this big empty house that they’ve given me so they don’t have to live with me.

The old woman, Ramona, like her umbrella, was from another time, a slower, quieter time, a time she missed. Despite a tight grip, the umbrella inflated above her hoary head, twisting in howling gusts. Cold raindrops plentiful as her days pin-pricked her eyes. Her feet shifted to avoid puddles but not fast enough, and her socks were soaked, and her feet soggy and cold.
I am only halfway to the grocery store. What a day, what clima!

I am the only passenger leaving the train at Oxford station. The platform is deserted and there’s a sharp chill in the air. The sky’s a dull white sheet. I sit on my roller bag, button up my cardigan and look around for Chrissy Sondheim. She said she’d be on the platform holding a card with my name on it. The silence is almost deafening. I think about the many times I came to Oxford when Alba was a student and how close we were. It had been the two of us against the world from the moment I gave birth to her.

It’s 7:30 A.M. Xavier walks up to his office building and stops. Later that morning he must give a sales presentation to a prospective client. As he goes through the revolving door, he tries on a wary smile. His personal black dog is back. My Black Dog. That’s what Churchill had called his depression. The truth is that Xavier’s Black Dog rarely leaves him. When his dog isn’t biting, she is sitting on his heart like a forty-pound dumbbell balanced precariously. Could a heart that weighs maybe a pound support a forty-pound dumbbell? No! Of course not! It would be crushed.

Today is not one of Harold’s better days. He’s fed up with Susan again. “You just stand there in the corner all day!” he shouts when she appears, which is pretty much a result of whatever’s going on in Harold’s mind at any given time. “Talk to me!” he commands. “Why won’t you talk to me?” It relaxes him to see her and he yearns to fall into the comfortable cadences they had for the ten years they were married before she died. When it doesn’t happen, he becomes frustrated and angry the way he is today.

Kai Lee is sixteen. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, she arrives at nine o’clock for her job at the Read-On Paper Bookstore. The morning mall walkers pass her, usually on their last loop or two. Sometimes they’ve finished and are heading into the food court. Wherever they are, they say, “Good morning, Kai,” in cheerful unison.