My husband, who loved festivals, who was a great fan of festivals, wanted to get to the square in time for the first band at eleven o’clock.

“Enter,” she says, and is obeyed.

My lil sister/niece/granddaughter/baby cousin doesn’t know she’s pretty, so she asks everybody, one post at a time. Her mom showed up at her high school graduation, no one had seen her in eight years. 

What is Miss Treece’s trouble, according to a popular notion?

Lexy knew better than to turn around. The swings were twisted up to the steel frame, the soles of her flip-flops planted in the dust.

My cashier’s black hair was beautiful. Though not unlike mine, it was shinier and thicker, and hung glamorously down to her waist. It looked strong, too, like Christopher Reeve’s in the Superman movies. 

He was thinking of Lookfar, abandoned long ago, beached on the sands of Selidor. Little of her would be left by now, a plank or two down in the sand maybe, a bit of driftwood on the western sea. 

Claire’s roommates threw her out on November third, for falling behind on rent and hogging the Xbox. During the next three weeks, she lived in other people’s houses. She missed the Xbox, but couch surfing was like a game.

Not the scent of the smoke, but the sight of it, not the sight itself, but the screen through which it altered the sunlight—she couldn’t articulate the change exactly, it’s just that the light seemed odd, like the acidic light of a nightmare. 

Mr. Field, a concert pianist, splinters his wrist in a train crash and uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only in photographs—a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town.