One night before the fisherman went to sleep he removed his wedding ring and placed it on the nightstand. The next morning his wife was gone.

Kalpana had been struck by that Indian butler character, since that late night when the movie was on television, and she’d already seen the Star Trek re-run on the other channel.

Waiting for his assignment, Wally was pulled to the newsfeed. A teenager in Jackson Heights went to a roof, jumped to her death.

She has pockmarks blooming across her surface. Blotches of grey, brown and black interrupt the creamy white. She has melted at an astonishing rate.

She can see only as far as her headlights, not that there’s much to see. At some point, the road becomes unmarked and lane-less, liable to end without warning. Zayna rolls slowly. Not out of care, just no longer mindful of her speed or time. The radio—on since she left Jeffeh—strains for a signal. It seems lost in static for good, but so it had countless times—always returning to a late-night call-in show that went on and on.

Masood stood under the monument to Christopher Columbus in the sweltering heat of a Barcelona summer evening, staring down La Rambla and waiting for Lauren, the tall column rising above him into the darkening sky, the conqueror pointing out across the glittering water, when he remembered why he never liked visiting cities twice.

For several days, he steers his battered lorry through the Ganga’s plains. Without delivering the load of 300 apple crates he ferried over the shoulders of the Himalayas to Hindustan, he decides to return home.

Perhaps it is the spectacle of Mother Nature. The special science field trip in the eleventh grade, on the very day her sister misses school because of food poisoning (someone had laced the brownies with Ex-Lax at the neighborhood picnic the afternoon before). A moment of unparalleled beauty.

The stare of the gypsy girl, taut as a cable. She sits opposite to me, next to an older woman, probably her mother, in an open truck.

You know her. Have heard of her through cautionary tales with the caution being

dispensed dubious at best and unnecessary at worst.

She first saw Sure at a pub in town. The place was like a cellar with wooden pillars in awkward places which made it hard to dance but easy to look all angles. Galway was thronged per its Saturday usual, pubs packed, the cobblestone streets streaming with people. The weather was warm, and there was a sheen on people’s faces, more than just the drink.

The week before I turn thirty-four, the rising waters flood my stupid, spiteful Red Hook rental for the second time.

Of course, Evelyn would bring up the list. Because, inevitably, Evelyn will ask Sanaya about a man. And it won’t be in the way people asked when Sanaya was in her 20s or 30s, it’ll be in the don’t-mean-to-but-have-to-ask way of her 40s.

The front of the white envelope had her name scribbled in purple ink.  She had not noticed it before when she had first grabbed it from atop the pile of stamped mail, but now the more she stared, the more she could see that he had squeezed the letter ‘H’ between the ‘C’ and the ‘O,” as if he had forgotten how to spell her name.