Jillian Reese is sipping a venti Starbucks Green Tea Frappuccino on a bench in the Men’s Department of Nordstrom’s. So far, for the occasion of her fiancé’s return from a three-year deployment in Afghanistan, she hasn’t garnered the energy she needs to begin searching for something special to wear on the day she welcomes him home. Her plan is to continue sitting and sipping until inspiration strikes.
Jillian practically grew up inside this store trailing behind her mother’s shoes. Brown snow boots with black fur trim in wintertime. Pastel, strappy sandals in the hot weather. When she was a child, department store mannequins looked different. Then, they looked like real people. Male mannequins in pleated shorts and short-sleeved golf shirts with muscled arms hanging relaxed by their thighs.…
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In the hotel hallway, an old lover started to knock on my room’s door while my boyfriend writhed in bed, suffering from what may have been my mother’s deliberate attempt at poison. The soft but echoing tap overlapped with the former’s voice.
“Laura. You there?”
“Juan,” I said quietly, “Please. You must go.” I had pressed my face against the door, ear squeezed against it to speak as soft as I could. We were on the third of five floors, and in an awful spot where guests could gather. How my parents managed to get ahold of Juan in such a short time was beyond me.
“Not without my confession first.”
I groaned.
And while he spoke, I rewound the day.…
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Riding the elevator up to the seventh floor, Carl can smell the craziness getting stronger. What is the smell, exactly? He thinks it must be what animals pick up from terrified prey, a secretion that reeks of vulnerability, an invitation to attack. Then he wonders: is it coming from the psych ward, or from me?
The seventh-floor lobby is as small as he remembers, with off-white walls and a wide reinforced door. Carl takes a breath, presses the button next to the door, and presents his face to the camera overhead. A moment later he hears a sharp buzz. Beyond the door is a windowless waiting area: hard plastic seats against a long wall, a small reception desk, another reinforced door that leads directly into the ward.…
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Ben was blind from birth. His mother knew it the moment she held him and saw his star-shaped irises and pupils. The iris themselves were gray with little white flecks in them, and the pupils were (as pupils tend to be) black as the depths of space. His mother was shocked at her first glimpse, but she couldn’t help cuddling and nursing her child with starry eyes of her own, the kind that made her heart pound and warmth flood her being. The doctors told her that his eyes were completely unresponsive to light, that the problem went deeper than just their shape, but his mother insisted that there was no ‘problem’, that she couldn’t imagine a more perfect shape for her beautiful baby boy.
Immediately, of course, when an aunt told the neighbors about the baby’s eyes, the buzz spread like smoke from a chimney, and, soon after, everyone in town was whispering about The Boy With Star-Shaped Eyes. …
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My job here in the apartment building is to make sure people put their garbage down the chute. There’s one of them on every floor, so there’s no excuse for people to leave bags full of dirty diapers and kitchen scraps and used takeout containers in front of their doors. It’s not only unpleasant for the other residents and their guests to look at—not to mention smell—but it also attracts roaches. And then the management company has to call an exterminator. Exterminators cost money. Call the exterminator enough, and our rent goes up. We’re all in this together.
That’s what I tell everyone when I see their trash outside of their apartment. I knock on their door, and even if they won’t open it, I know they are in there, and so I say it anyway.…
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To whom it may concern,
You don’t know me, and I don’t know you. Tomorrow will be the last day of my life. I didn’t want to leave this world just like that. It is difficult for a man to face his end, knowing he has passed through life as a ghost. Sometimes frightening people, but mostly invisible, transparent, with no effect on the things he touched. A man both living and dead, a dead man walking, if you want to call it that. The greatest mystery has been revealed to me in these last few days. What is the meaning of living? The answer was recounted to me by a dead dog I found several nights ago on the side of the road that leads to Atlacomulco: There is no meaning; it said amid the buzzing of the hundreds of flies feasting on its decomposing head.…
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Now that we know what today can be like, can we ever go back to yesterday? She addressed her question to the silver toaster on the counter. In response, it threw up two pieces of toast. Burnt and crisp. She took a bite.
Chew, swallow, gulp. Taste? An afterthought.
The toast was eaten. Tea, coffee, and cigarettes consumed. It was too early for wine.
Hers was a ground-floor studio without a balcony. Only a window which looked out to a once-bustling Dubai street. Now it was silent. Forlorn. The birds few and far in between visited every now and then. But mostly she was on her own.
It had been four weeks since the lockdown.
*
A sparrow descended on her window. Flapping its small wings, the shadowy grey patterns like shutters opening and closing, like the aeroplanes that no longer littered the sky.…
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