On la noché de las velitas, the night of the candles, my family was setting up a vigil for my dead brother in the shape of a hawk, his favorite bird.

During the post-lunch lull at Cousin Luther’s, I thought I’d discovered the cure to all that ailed me.

The office ladies have opinions. They’ve been here longer than you. They’ve worked in this office since you were in university, twenty years ago.

Maybe it’s not so bad to be promiscuous says my mom over Indian food that day we had lunch now that she’s 70 and her body has created phantom pain.

Niggling. Is the feeling, the right word. The sensation is Belladonna Blue. Like a Ford Falcon tilting on a muted roadside, dusky Oleander petals slide across the dash, one she loves me/ two she loves me still.

So then Marcia peels back her collar to show us the two white marks on her neck, like we haven’t seen them every year, these two faded knots in a parallel line glaring out from her store-bought tan and as she strokes them

No, you don’t sound like a pedophile, silly. You’re a man of God playing Yahweh's Greatest Hits, from Genesis to Golgotha. The parents at the park trust you for this reason alone.

You go to shake my hand but you don’t because I’ve bled. My nails are dark in random corners but they are not random, these corners, the state of things. I am meticulous. I

I’m not like the other girls. The other girls know things I don’t know. The other girls know the rules.

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.