Eileen can feel the heat on her neck and smell the group of sweaty teenagers sitting five seats ahead of her on the city bus. They speak in a lingo that mocks her thirty-six accumulated years of practicing proper grammar. One of them stands in the aisle with his legs spread out for balance and talks about escaping the matrix. His friend, wearing a gigantic hoodie, looks around the bus, glances at Eileen and then looks to the side as if to roll his eyes at his friend.

The one-way bus ticket eats up a big chunk of his earnings and leaves him with just enough cash for a quick fix when he gets home—something to take the edge off while he figures out what to do about his stolen car. His mind is clouded with these thoughts as he climbs on the idling coach under the cover of the late November afternoon gloom. The driver pays him no mind, but a pair of elderly women near the front make their displeasure known, clucking their tongues in unison as he shuffles past. He gets it.

I’ve always been afraid of the dark. It’s strange, I know. Mermaongs are supposed to be adventurous. We’re meant to love every part of the ocean—from its glittering surface to the rotting hull of a drowned ship, to the thrill of the Deep Dark, where the blind fish and the shadows with teeth live. There is always some measure of dark: the shadow of fish or sharks, a cloud passing overhead, the shape of something in the distance.

Outskirts of a mining town in northern Minnesota
August 1990
A ten-year-old girl named Ursula Dahl chases after a porcupine behind her mother’s trailer, her frizzy red hair sparkling in the late-summer light. The animal escapes through a wild raspberry patch, but the child refuses to give up.

To respect the privacy of the person I’m going to tell you about, I’ve given him the alias Dr. Theodore J. Ammon. If I tell his story well, after you’ve read it you will ask yourself whether you have known people whose lives have been affected in a similar way by the experiences of their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents.

David Harris stood at the front of a group of about fifty protesters gathered in a church parking lot just east of a strip of I-43 designated as Jeannetta Simpson-Robinson Memorial Highway just north of downtown Milwaukee. He was closely listening to the instructions being given by a young woman wearing a black T-shirt with I Can’t Breathe printed in large, white, block letters across the chest.

The hospital department chiefs hold monthly meetings in a conference room. The room has a high ceiling and tall windows. The walls are made of mahogany panels. There are large portraits of previous medical school deans on the wall. All of them are men in dark suits and black bow-ties, each holding either a pen or a book in their hands, looking straight ahead with an air of importance.

Derry was my best friend, but that was a long time ago.
Since then, I built my career while Derry played in a band. I saved for retirement and Derry saw the world. And when I bought a house, Derry was still burning through a revolving door of roommates. Derry always used to say, “Sam… you’re the Yin to my Yang.”

Jasper looked up at the clear, starlit, advent sky. A sharp north easterly had blown away the relentless gloom of the past fortnight and he gladly breathed in the nipping December air. He thought of the fingerless gloves he’d left behind at the church after rehearsal the previous evening. He would miss them this morning and considered for a moment passing the vicarage to see if they could be retrieved.

I often imagine if people were to ask me what I was feeling the day Zeus came to me, I doubt they would anticipate my reply. I prayed, not to Zeus, not to Hades, not to Apollo, nor Poseidon or any other god. No, I prayed to Hera.

Walking back to the squad car carrying two fresh wrapped pastrami sandwiches, my heart is pounding and hands sweating, the growl in my stomach doesn’t drown out the voice in my head that scolds me, “See. You should have listened to your old man, you idiot.”

Blessed Margaret of Castello was a blind, hunchbacked dwarf whose aristocratic parents could barely stand the sight of her. Born in Metola, Italy, in 1287, she spent her childhood isolated from the world because her parents found her so repulsive that when she was six years old, they had a small cell built in the forest next to their chapel and locked Margaret away like a lunatic.

What now?
Rose.
Rose was the only person I trusted, the only one who was kind to me that day. I went for a long walk and wound up at a quiet park where bushes exploded with red and yellow flowers reaching for the sky. Too late, I noticed three guys closing in behind. The last thing I remember was the smell of their sweat and the red mud caked on their boots.

Elonda stared out of her window, squeezing her face into the entire frame, and her breath began to fog up the dew-struck glass. She quickly used her sleeve to wipe away a near perfect circle. The winter was visible again.

Bill returned home after a particularly strenuous workday to find Loretta in the living room nose to nose in conversation with a stranger. Rather than interrupt, or inquire what was going on, he observed from the doorway.

Cordelia Cates stepped out onto her deck overlooking the lake as she cradled her coffee cup, which had more than a splash of Bailey’s Irish Cream added in for good measure. She sighed as she wrapped her cardigan around her with the other hand and surveyed the red clouds overhead.

The situation was this: Bret’s ringing phone had woken him up just before daybreak. Jeff, his once fairly close, but now hardly close friend, sounding frantic, had asked him to meet him. Bret had said he would and asked where, and Jeff had calmed down enough to give him clear directions.

When Nataliya had finished the last crumbs of her cake, I paid the bill and we left the café, the bell tinkling as the door closed behind us. At half past four, the grey winter afternoon had already turned to night. I offered Nataliya my arm, as the cobbled street was slippery with frozen snow.

It’s almost midnight when they leave the beach, tired, thirsty, still too high from the freely flowing weed. They’re jammed into Ed’s aging blue Volkswagen, Lisbeth up front, Jonathan and Denise crowbarred into the tiny back seat as they head onto the Mid-Cape Highway for the trip back to Manhattan from Truro.

If this is not a meat bun from heaven, Dr. Wu doesn’t know what would it be. A meat bun from heaven (天上掉馅饼) is a Chinese saying, meaning pure luck.
Dr. Wu has worked as a Rehab physician in the hospital in Texas for a few years. A few weeks ago, her department chief, only in his fifties, suddenly left.

The gentleman was always a man of contradictions. Born in the quiet, unassuming town of Nowhere, Tennessee, his early life unfolded amidst the slow rhythms of rural America, where the days stretched on like the endless horizon.

She twirls a slender dagger in her hand, while Egypt’s Pharaoh drinks wine from a golden cup. Seth settles across his cushioned lounge, dark eyes locked firmly on Neferet’s twisting fingers.

His grandparents had gotten drunk on Saphire highballs with friends around the fire the night before, and the way they had started acting strangely—grinning and cackling through the evening, their faces gone somehow wicked and distant…

News of the impending arrival of a word warrior shook the sleepy town of Surrender, New Mexico. For Deputy Sheriff Ingrid Zoe Cole (“Izzy” for short), it didn’t change her routine much, except she took a second glass of bourbon instead of her usual one at lunch.