Walt takes no comfort reminiscing about his youth. Tales of simpler times and way back when settle like pits in his stomach. For those with nothing to hide, perhaps long-ago decades truly were simpler. But for those free only in shadow, secretly living beyond acceptable societal standards, those memories breed only misery.
His grandchildren bring him pictures they find in his wife’s “treasure” boxes. They shove crinkled black and white images in his face and ask him questions about “olden days”. Each one slices open an unhealed wound, a shattered dream, a life dismantled. When he’s on the edge of tears, he picks up a newspaper and pretends to read. Walt’s wife steps in, nudging the children away from his recliner. Grandpa is old, she tells them, his hearing isn’t what it used to be.…
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Tobacco-stained fingernails dug into Radha’s flesh.
She started to protest, but he squeezed her wrist. Her words shrank into a yelp that bubbled from her lips. She didn’t understand why he was so angry; then again, he never needed a reason.
She struggled against his grip, and he twisted her wrist as hard as he could. There was a muffled crack, and her vision went white.
Radha woke with tears in her eyes. She glanced around and realized that she had fallen asleep on the couch in her living room. She dried her eyes and massaged her throbbing wrist. It should have healed by now, but it still ached whenever a storm was coming.
She sat up and stared out of the window.…
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1321. Lunchtime. But this P2WM5 is due 1500.
No time for a sit-down. J1N1 sends in sandwiches.
I doff my heels, unbutton my collar, and eat at my picture window.
My last promotion, they were surprised when I chose this 5th-floor office. A non-corner-office; furniture outmoded; and so low! I said: ‘I have acrophobia.’
I couldn’t say: ‘I want to look, one last year, out of the eyes of the beast.’ This picture window looks into the slum across the road.
The men are coming home for lunch. From where? From that corner. Beyond that corner, my picture window doesn’t see. The men are mostly autorickshaw drivers.
Some of the young men, who’ve acquired broken English, work as shop assistants. They don’t come home for lunch.…
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Mary opens the maintenance garage at the golf course before sunrise. A bird is waiting inside to greet her. A belted kingfisher, rare for Missouri in late December. In a flash of slate blue, the bird soars out through the garage opening. Three hours of tree trimming later, she sees the bird again––for two seconds, maybe three––near the sixteenth hole, under the bare oak behind the green. She cuts back limbs on trees that surround the putting surface, then works through the seventeenth hole, the eighteenth. She returns to the garage. In the break room, she heats up what’s left of the coffee she brewed for herself hours earlier—this time of year, she’s the only person on the course. As the club owner, she gives her staff two weeks off for the holidays.…
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Father Pepe swept the volcanic ash off the sidewalk leading to his church. The narrow shoulders on his slight frame moved back and forth in rhythm as he worked his way down the walkway. A young man approaching middle age, Father Pepe appeared delicate but wiry.
The volcano had never erupted in an explosion of lava. Instead, it constantly belched out the ash that covered the town of Santa Clara and the fields of coffee plants nearby, like God emptied his ashtray over the land. Everyone in the village cleaned away volcanic ash from windowsills, cars, and walkways daily.
The coffee fields were the lynchpins of Santa Clara’s economy, and despite efforts to prevent it, the ash choked the plants. If the volcano did not cease its grey discharge soon, the coffee shrubs would all be dead, and so would Santa Clara.…
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I was inside the bathroom, balancing blood on the back of my hand when there was a knock on the door.
“Yeah?” I asked.
He mumbled something. I balled up a tissue and placed it on the cuts and it drank like a vampire bat.
“Everything okay?” I asked.
Another mumble.
“I can’t hear you, buddy. Speak up.”
The tissue clung to my skin, so I used my free hand to slide the razor blade from the counter, open the drawer and slip it into the slit of the small tin box meant to house such things. It clanked inside, landing on top of the others.
“Can I have some milk?” he asked.
“I turned your show on,” I said. “Why don’t you watch that?”
I plopped the blood-soaked tissue into the toilet.…
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“Do you remember the couple we met at the Lalonde wedding,” Ellen asked, picking up a four-jar gift pack – Tandoori, Balti, two other labels Jack couldn’t read from where he stood – and examining it. She had convinced him to celebrate Diwali this year in support of their daughter Megan’s betrothal to Aarush, a med student from Jaipur. The thought of it gave him heartburn, the food, the possibility of meeting Aarush’s parents and celebrating a Hindu religious festival, penance Ellen exacted for his attitude toward their nuptials. Not that he cared about their religion, or any religion really. But Megan was only twenty-one and finishing her bachelor’s in music therapy. Aarush still had to complete two years of interning.
Now here he was following her around the aisles at Penzey’s Spices.…
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