​Nothing’s certain anymore, not when it comes to Stephen. Some days, he flings open the door and greets me with a firm smile and a clap on the shoulder, and it’s then that I remember him as he used to be. The student who worked hard and earned good grades, the son who gave up his chance at college to take over Dad’s shop, the brother who stayed with us for years after Danny enlisted. Solid. Steadfast. Always there.
Other days, he looks at me and thinks I’m Dad, or Uncle Evan, or even Danny. Ruth says we’re lucky he remembers our names at all, this far into the disease. She’s been doing a lot of research from the beginning—even more now that he’s moved in with her. Personally, I don’t see where the luck comes in, what with him getting dementia at the ripe old age of forty eight.
Ruth’s place is nice, a cream-colored house tucked onto the edge of a side-street. With its worn lemony shutters and its white wooden porch, it’s the kind of place you could call quaint. I’m his brother and Ruth’s only a cousin, but we both agreed he’d like it better here—at least, better than my cluttered, cramped apartment in the city. It doesn’t make me a bad person, I don’t think. I mean, at least I drive up to visit him once or twice a month.
Today, he’s outside when I pull into the driveway. He’s wearing an old t-shirt and baggy pants, shuffling towards the edge of the yard with a pleasant smile on his face. I almost don’t want to interrupt him—he looks more peaceful than I’ve seen him in a while, but Ruth says that when he tries to run away, it’s better to divert him early on. Before he gets lost and upset.
            There’s a white picket fence in front of me. I need to get over it—I need to go home, back to Mom and Dad and Danny and Michael. Where...what am I doing here? I need to go home. Home. I need to--
I slam the car door shut. Dammit, where’s Ruth when you need her? She’s much better at dealing with him than I’ll ever be. I walk up behind him and tap him on the shoulder. He turns around, raising an eyebrow. I force a warm smile.
“Stephen? Stephen, hi.”
            Someone taps my shoulder, and I blink. Another tap, and I turn around.
A man stands behind me, shifting from foot to foot. I don’t recognize him. He has wild graying hair, muddy green eyes. His brow is furrowed in concern. Something about him seems familiar, but I can’t…
He stares at me blankly. He starts to turn around, and I reach out and grab his wrist.
“Stephen, you need to go home. We’re going to go home now, ok?”
He frowns and tilts his head.
He’s saying something now, but it’s as if his words are bouncing off of my mind. I can’t catch them, can’t understand them. He says something about home...
“Home? That’s where I’m going. I’m going home.”
I shake my head and point towards the house.
“Home is that way.”
The man shakes his head. No, home is that way? What? What is he saying? I turn and look. A strange house looms over me, stiff and cream-colored. No, no—he can’t make me go there, I have to go home! Who is he? What does he want? No, he can’t make me, I won’t go, I…
He follows my gaze and a change comes over him. His brow furrows, his muscles tense, and he wrenches his arm out of my grip, his eyes wild.
I take a step back.
I swallow and hold up my hands.
 “Stephen, come on. Come inside. You know me.”
He squints at me, and I can see the anger slowly draining from his face as he forgets.
“Dammit! Stephen, you know me!”
Where am I? The man in front of me...do I know him? He looks like my father.
“Dad?”
He pauses and stares at me for a moment. Dad?
I’m your brother, I want to say, but it’s hopeless. I know it’ll only upset him, but I have to bite my tongue to prevent the words from coming out.
Something is off; my father’s hair has always been cropped close to his head, and his eyes are brown. Still, the resemblance is so clear...who else could it be?
“Dad?”
“Yeah. It’s me. I’m Dad. Stephen, let’s go inside, ok?”
The man hesitates, but he finally nods. Yes; it’s him.
He lets me guide him across the lawn and towards the door.
Relief mingles with the uneasiness in my stomach, but I push it all aside as he guides me towards the house.
I glance towards the window and see another man on the other side. He looks like the first, but he’s older, and his hair is shorter. He wears what seems to be pajamas—an old t-shirt and a baggy pair of pants. He’s thin and weak, in dire need of a shave, and confusion darkens his eyes. I almost feel sorry for him.
“Who’s that? Who’s that inside the house? I don’t know him.”
He freezes suddenly as we pass the window, and his brow furrows again.
He’s staring at his own reflection.
                                                                        

​There are about a dozen of them scattered across the darkened lawn. Through the slow haze that curls up from the bonfire, Allison watches the group align and realign, their soda cans and their flyaway laughs sounding together in the dead heat of June. She searches for Audrey, finds her by the copper gleam of her hair. Her sister is standing with a few other girls, their backs blurring through the faint slip of smoke. They’re close to the fire – maybe a bit too close. She should say something. She’ll tell them to move away, later.
For now, her fingers drum against the low porch step, and she glances around at the rest of the group. They look alright, actually, and it’s a nice evening, with the taste of the wind and the scent of the burning logs. Yes, it’s a nice evening, and someone’s even strung fairy lights all along the roof of the back porch. The bulbs brim warm against the falling night, ghosting across her arms.
Years from now, when she has seen her fair share of burning, she will allow herself to remember nothing of this moment but the firelight, the way that it washes over her sister’s copper hair. Now, though – now, she sees it all. The innocent step backwards. The shy leap of the flames, the initial hesitation as they stretch towards Audrey’s head. Then, the way that they command, swallow her up and into themselves.
Some time later, there are sirens in the air. The car that she rides in follows the ambulance, and the lights of the street stream past her window like broken egg yolks.
She learns amid white walls of the ER that Audrey will be alright – thank God, says the doctor to her parents, they pulled her out in time. Of course – and here, his eyes deepen with practice – the burns are third degree, they’ll scar. Quite badly.
                There are visits to the hospital over the next few weeks. She hates them, hates the lights that try too hard to be warm and the thick yellow scent of the antiseptic. Audrey sleeps, most of the time, except to eat and to run her fingers through her charred hair, to stare at the scabs on her shoulders. It’s late July when she comes home, and though the burns have healed, she wears a thin white bandage across the left side of her face. She seems to do a little less of everything. Talks less, sleeps less, breathes more cautiously.
It begins with the matches. Allison doesn’t dare to ask, but three times a week now, she finds them withered in the garbage, black and tender and, sometimes, still warm. Their parents are careful with fire now; the doctors have told them that it may upset her. They don’t turn on the stove around her, or send them to bed with the electric fireplace roaring. And here she is, striking matches in secret, smashing her piggy bank and buying a lighter and hiding it in her pillowcase.
Allison catches her at it, once, ducks into the closet when she hears footsteps on the stairs. She looks around and, slowly, draws her hand from under her blanket with the lighter clenched firmly in her palm. She sits on the rug and flicks it – back and forth, on and off, and again. Allison watches through the door crack as the light sputters on and off in her sister’s eyes – it scares her, the way that flame thrashes
                Her parents find out, somehow, on a Saturday evening – she knows because they ask her to go upstairs, say they want to talk to her sister alone. She hurries to her room and clamps her head between two pillows, but she needn’t have bothered – their voices are low enough to drown in the walls. After several moments of silence, she rises and presses her ear to the door. There are words, many of them, strung into taut and worried lines. A question. Because I can control it, comes Audrey’s response. I’m in control.
                Later that night, Audrey rises from her bed and leaves the room. Allison hears the garage door open, and moments later, through the window, sees her sister emerge toting a can of gasoline. She stands in the middle of the stoop and spills it wildly across the lawn and the drive – the moonlight catches the beads of oil, and she can almost hear them whistle as they tear through the darkness. She moves back and tosses a single lit match onto the glistening grass.
The blaze spreads quickly and rises high – Audrey feels it in her chest as she felt the matches, the lighter, but this is so much larger. So much fiercer.
A spark catches a wooden beam, and then a porch rail, and then a doorway. It makes its way up the wooden beams, eating through the walls.
As her parents and sister scramble out, a girl crouches amid the darkness and watches the world burn.

A few months ago, as part of a benchmark essay for my eighth period class, I was asked a question (the one in the title), and it left my mind reeling. I can’t remember what exactly I wrote on that benchmark, but I turned the issue over in my head for long after the forty minute period was over. Were all artists creative? Was I?
Though deceptively simple, the core of the question, for me, became this: what is creativity, and how can we measure it? The discussion cast a light on doubts and insecurities that had been ricocheting around at the back of my skull for years. Were all artists creative? If not, what determined which ones were? And as a writer, how was I meant to know whether I was creative enough? The dictionary definition (the use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work) wasn’t good enough; I needed to know whether it was a process or a product, measured by what you put in or by what you get out of it.
The culture surrounding creativity, both in education and in society as a whole, teaches us that it’s an innate quality, something which certain people possess in large quantities and others lack altogether. We learn that some people possess so much of it that they are “creatives,” wild, passionate, and often temperamental souls with an inexplicable drive to contribute to the world’s body of art, literature, drama, or music (for the most part, we’re only taught to associate creativity with those few fields). We learn in childhood that creativity is something to be valued and embraced, but the older we grow, the more the focus shifts from taking risks and exploring questions to succeeding on tests and avoiding mistakes.
There’s also a tendency to quantify the creativity of an artist according to the success of their work. The most famous poets (Dickinson, Poe, Keats, Shakespeare) are the most creative; the lesser-known ones, less so. In fact, our culture imbues us with the belief that “true creativity” (the kind we associate with muses and lightbulbs) is only accessible to those few people who we deem creative geniuses. It imbues us with the belief that, just as most people will not be geniuses, most people will not be creatives.
Creativity (as society defines it) means something rare and magical. It means producing one remarkable work after another. It means channeling some sort of divine, inhuman energy which is inaccessible to the general populace and gives its wielder the ability to produce a masterpiece with no effort at all.
As romantic and enchanting as it feels, this cultural perception of the creative mind doesn’t line up at all with my own experience with creativity. Sure, words and ideas flow sometimes, but far more often, I spend hours poring over a single paragraph or a single line, trying to mold the words on the page into a shape that resonates. What’s more, when we listen to the greatest of the great, these so-called “creatives,” talk about their life’s work, not one of them mentions anything about that elusive magic of inspiration that they’re supposedly in possession of. Instead, Oscar Wilde proudly declares that he has spent all morning putting in a comma and all afternoon taking it out. James Joyce advises us that “errors are the portals of discovery”. Hemingway tells us that he has rewritten the ending of A Farewell to Arms over thirty-nine times (and it is later discovered to be forty-seven).
Personally, I prefer a much simpler definition of the term “creativity”: to be creative is not to produce great work, or to have great skill with a paintbrush, or to change the world with your art. To be creative is simply to create, simply to embrace the process of creation. To be creative is to experiment, to be passionate, to be not just willing, but actually eager, to take risks and put yourself out there. To be creative is to embrace failure as an opportunity rather than a setback, to be genuinely fascinated by, and wholly dedicated to, whatever pursuit you choose. Creativity isn’t an innate ability so much as it’s a mindset and a process, and while it’s certainly present  in the arts, it’s also present in the sciences, in the humanities, in sports and music and academia and every other discipline you can imagine (though society usually calls it “innovation” or “discovery” there).
Nearly all of them discuss setbacks just as much as successes—they speak about failure as though it’s inevitable and welcome. There’s no evidence of “genius” as society defines it; there’s talent, yes, but more than that, there’s passion and risk and an earnest desire to learn and to try.
Stephen King says in his writing guide and memoir that if you sit around waiting for inspiration to strike, then you’ll be sitting around waiting forever. As with any art form, you gain proficiency in writing by exposing yourself to a lot of it, trying it yourself, and being willing to fail (all of which happens naturally when you’re passionate).
Creatives themselves are telling us that it has nothing to do with inspiration or brilliance and everything to do with engaging with what they love and embracing their own potential to put new ideas and perspectives into the world.
When we conflate creativity with the final product of creativity, when we look at a play like Death of a Salesman or a poem like The Waste Land and assume that the author produced it all in a single night after being struck by a sudden flash of almost otherworldly inspiration, we bury the reality of the creative process. In reality, those works are the product of years upon years and drafts upon drafts, countless hours spent writing and rewriting and rewriting and polishing and then scrapping everything and beginning again from scratch. They aren’t brilliant because their authors possessed a “creative spirit”; no muse descended from up above, and no sudden lightbulb of inspiration suddenly brought the whole world into sharp clarity. They’re brilliant because their authors engaged in the process of creativity and failed a thousand times before they succeeded.
Creativity is engagement in the process of creating. It isn’t quantifiable; it just is. And as poetic as it sounds to describe it as magical, it’s no more elusive than buttered toast or scrambled eggs or ripped jeans. It has very little to do with the product, the final, polished piece, and everything to do with the process, the risk-taking, the invention, the constant rhythm of failing and learning and trying and trying again.
Creativity isn’t synonymous with constant success in an artistic field; in fact, I’d say that it’s synonymous with failure. Creativity isn’t synonymous with genius, but it is the path to what we call genius. To bring it back to the question at hand: yes, I believe that all artists are creative, regardless of  how well-known or critically acclaimed their work is, because all artists engage in the process of creation.
 

​There is something undeniably beautiful about words. About their nuances, their subtleties, their unspoken syllables and their quiet connotations. About the way that they slip, unnoticed, through the human heart. They are mere snapshots, stray thoughts like butterflies caught from the air and pressed into the page. And yet, wind rolls off their wings and ripples through nations, leaving thousands, even millions, swaying in their wake.
To write is to fall in love with language, not because of the power that it can wield, but because of its truth and the untapped beauty that lies within each word. To write is to peel back the folds of human nature with a pen and a bottle of ink, and to embrace the right and the wrong and everything in between. It is to love life and to hate it, and to delve into the graying depths of the human soul. To dream and to put down on paper what others dare not think. The end is unlike any other – more satisfying, and more honest. But the journey is long, and the road is hard.
It all begins with a seed. A flicker of thought, a snippet of a memory, a figure glimpsed out of the corner of an eye. An old man with a broken umbrella. A roaring train. A young girl pouring cold lemonade over her brother’s head. It is easy to brush these visions away, far out of memory’s reach. But to write is to notice them and to bring them into the light. To spill them out onto the page in a wave of unfiltered, unburdened words.
The first draft. A tangle of phrases, misspelled and misplaced, often senseless and never quite what they should be. It’s a scrap pile of language; the whole is not yet greater than the sum of its parts. But to write is to search, and to find something glowing there, amid the thinly veiled clichés and the half-formed thoughts. The seed -- still small, perhaps, and still fresh -- but there is nothing quite like it in the world.
To write is to rewrite. These are the words of Ernest Hemmingway and E. B. White, Roald Dahl and Stephen King. A mantra shared among generations of writers; an inescapable truth. Behind every book, every poem and every line, there are scores of deleted letters, discarded pages, scribbles and arrows and footnotes running down the paper like tired scars. To write is to rewrite. Phrase by phrase, letter by letter, carving away at the words until they ring true.
It’s exhausting, even frustrating, and yet somehow, it’s exhilarating. Because to write is to seize humanity in all its glory and all its shame and all its strength and all its weakness, and to scratch it into the page, one word at a time. One thought at a time. And then, to wrap it all in paper and send it into tomorrow.
To write is to pass a life with a pen in hand, embracing humanity through language. To write is to spin realities into dreams.

            Growing up as one of four brown-skinned kids in my elementary school grade, I considered myself something of an authority on racism. Racism, I would have told you then, was when my best friend looked over at me halfway through a doll game and asked me if Indian music ever used ‘real words’. Racism, I would have said, was when I had to waste all of recess explaining to some white kids that some people weren’t Christian or Jewish. Racism was when a white friend’s mother assumed upon meeting me that my favorite subject was math. You heard talk of hatred and prejudice on the news, but ten-year-old me could’ve told you that this big “racial disparity” thing everyone seemed so worked up about was really just a bunch of minor inconveniences, a few ignorant questions that white people were forever asking and people of color were forever being irritated by. She could’ve told you that real racism, the kind that snatched lives and violated bodies, may as well have gone out of existence with the dinosaurs hundreds of years ago.          
           In between construction paper crafts and lessons on three-digit addition, my teachers taught me that America was a pretty incredible place to live, no matter what color your skin was. I learned to see the face of racism as a caricature, an old, balding white man who smoked lots of cigars, mumbled slurs under his breath, and spat at people of color when they passed him in the street. Looking back, I think I expected all racists to wear some sort of badge, to wave around Confederate flags or tattoo the words “proud KKK member” across their foreheads. They were rare monsters who hid out on the edges of society, leftovers from a bygone era, an ancient species on the verge of total extinction. I’d certainly never met a racist myself— and, I thought, I probably never would.
            Looking back, plenty of my own childhood memories poke holes in that theory. Like finding out over a bowl of cereal that one of my father’s cousins chose to marry his wife because she was the lightest-skinned out of all the women he and his family met during the search process. Or taking visiting relatives into the city, and hearing my jethu wonder, loudly, how America kept its crime rates down with “so many blacks all around." That last line was tough to write—looking back, I’m appalled at those words, and I’m even more appalled at my own inaction in the face of them. I felt uncomfortable and guilty and ashamed, and I stood there silently and shuffled in the heat and waited for someone else to inform him what was and wasn’t okay to say in America.
           I lay awake for hours that night after my mom tucked me in. I watched the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling fan spin around in circles, and I wondered what it meant that racism, that distant thing that I was so sure had disappeared decades ago, had made an appearance in my own life—in my own family. Did that make my jethu evil? Was he just that old, white caricature in disguise? Was I?
           I cut the thought off there, assuring myself with a fervor that there was no reason to feel guilty. Inaction was my right. Speaking up was a decision, not a duty. After all, I was a minority in this country. I carried no burden of historical shame. My ancestors had never enslaved or owned Black people, never taken Black lives, never benefited from the era of Jim Crow segregation. If racism was mostly ancient history, and my family’s ancient history was halfway around the globe, then I was free of responsibility here, a step removed from the whole sticky situation. I had nothing to atone for.
           A few years later, at a late-night Bengali get-together in Plainfield, thirteen-year-old me sat fidgeting on someone else’s couch, listening as the aunties and uncles talked about politics and real estate and their children.
           “Aaryan’s girlfriend came over yesterday,” Rohit Uncle said. “She’s a lovely girl. Chinese, very bright.”
           “You know,” Sharanya Auntie chimed in, “Shruti’s decided to go around with some African American.” She said African American with a certain inflection, like it was a code word that we were supposed to understand, and pursed her lips. “I don’t know why she can’t see a good Indian boy, but she’s so stubborn.”
           By that point, I understood that racism wasn’t always as explicit as a KKK rally—and I knew that this was it, plain and simple. It checked all the boxes, sent all the red flags flying. I expected to hear a chorus of shock and outrage and indignation, but the other aunties and uncles didn’t say anything. Some chuckled or nodded sympathetically. Rohit Uncle leaned forward, concerned.
            “You are sure he’s not a drug dealer?”
           I said nothing. I stared down at my plate, I stirred my half-eaten rasgulla around in its bowl, and I said nothing.
           I wish I could tell you that I had an epiphany later that night, that I suddenly understood everything that there was to know about racism and prejudice. It would make a much better story than the truth. But I was quiet for the rest of the evening, and quiet on the car ride home, and quiet that night as I watched the glow-in-the-dark stars spin around on the ceiling fan. I couldn’t make sense of it, couldn’t figure out why the real world didn’t match up with everything I thought I knew. Here was racism right in front of me, again. And it wasn’t a caricature. And it wasn’t innocuous. And it had come from an Indian person— from several Indian people, actually—which meant that I could be guilty of it, too.
That evening didn’t give me the answers, but it did make me start looking for them. I turned to the internet and read articles about the history of immigration and the purpose behind the supposedly anti-Asian Affirmative Action programs that I’d heard so much about. I learned about the model minority myth for the first time, and I started to piece together where I stood in this nation’s racial hierarchy. My six-year-old self was right on one count: what we do in modern America is incredible, in the sense that it’s nearly impossible to believe. The way we manipulate history to suit our needs, the way we claim that murder is a personal freedom, the way the same news outlets that promise truth deliberately stir up the same old lies and the same old hatred.
          Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what happened that evening. I just keep thinking myself in circles, trying to make sense of everything I’ve learned and everything I think I’ve learned. I keep wondering what kept me silent that evening, whether it’s still inside of me—how many myths are still simmering inside of me, informing and manipulating everything I do.
It’s not that they were bad people, and it’s not that they didn’t get it— most of those aunties and uncles had been brown-skinned in America in the weeks after 9/11, understood what it’s like to fear for their lives, understood hatred and prejudice and fear better than I could even try to. So why was it so easy for them to turn against someone else? It makes me wonder if prejudice is inevitable—will we ever be rid of the lies, or will we just keep building new myths out of the ruins of the old ones?
           I’m only just realizing that I can’t pick and choose which parts of America I want to take on. Though my roots may not be in this country, I certainly am. And though I may not benefit from white privilege, I do benefit from the privilege of not being Black every single day. I’m realizing that there’s no neutral ground—silence is complicity, and speaking up is a duty, not a favor. I’m realizing that racism never calls itself by that name, that it hides behind legal loopholes and doctored justifications and manipulated statistics made to look like truth. Racism is my shame, my guilt, my problem just as much as it’s anyone else’s.
         I wish I could bring this to some sort of conclusion, say something definitive and groundbreaking and tie a pretty bow around the whole essay, but the truth is that I’m sitting here at my desk in the early hours of the morning, and I’m still trying to figure it out. A pandemic is raging outside, and protests are breaking out across the nation, and I’ve been sitting in quarantine for the past few months with lots of questions and lots of fear and more time on my hands than I’ve had in years. And the same old quotes keep on taking on new meanings, and the same old patterns keep playing out around me, and I’m only just realizing how much time I’ve wasted trying to pretend that I’m not a part of them.

​There is nothing to the world but the here and now, that there is nothing more to humanity than consciousness and fumbling molecules and the sheer will to live. That we have seventy, maybe eighty, years of ourselves, and then the atoms rearrange and we leave behind an eternity of dust. We flare, each one of us, brief and bright and alone in our minds, and in our instant of a life, we grasp at connection. We are human; we thrive on connections. We survive on it.
It’s futile, really; true connection, the complete comprehension of the mind of another, is impossible. In all of my life, I will never truly see or know another being, and I will never truly be seen or known. Pure thought and pure emotion are bursts of lightning, and language is the wire that harnesses them. It can carry only a semblance of the real thing, only a slowed-down, tempered flow. It can’t transfer experience; but it can transfer the record of it. If you’ll excuse the clichéd metaphor, each of us is an island, and books are messages tucked into sea-tossed bottles.
I read because language is beautiful, because Fitzgerald’s words seem to glimmer against the heat and because Hemingway’s are bone-dry and clean as windblown dust. I read because I can’t help but read. Because it’s beautiful, but beyond that, because it’s real. Because though language is only a wire, wires can build circuits.
 

​As the boy trudged back in the failing light of dusk, the creaking trees leaned in towards him and cast barren shadows across his face. His features were fresh and bright, though thin with hunger and dark against the setting sun, and in his eyes, there was a sharp alertness, drawn out by years of cold. In his arms he cradled a faded knapsack, the same worn and aching gray as the autumn sky, and wrapped snugly within it lay a pile of dry kindling for the earl’s fire.
Squinting at the blurred outline of the manor in the distance, he could see that he had a long walk ahead. There had been plenty of sticks and dead leaves closer by, of course, but they had been slightly damp and already on the ground and unfit for his lordship’s noble hearth. So, the boy had been sent deep into the woods to fetch kindling deserving of his lordship’s status, and he had spent the past hour snapping new branches from the trees with his bare hands. Now those hands were raw and blue, and trembling from the weight of the wood.
The boy knew only exhaustion and hunger and a deep, cold desire to go home. But he knew, also, that he would be slapped or beaten or worse if he did not return in time for the earl’s supper, and so, despite the aching in his legs, he began to walk faster. He could feel numbness prickling on his fingertips and the taste of coming rain on the air, and a shiver ran through him as he clutched the knapsack tighter to his chest.
When his father had died, his mother had sat him down, her eyes still rimmed in red. After his father’s death, she said, his lordship had taken their ox, and they could only use it to plow their fields if they paid him. Since they had no money, they would have to pay by sending him a servant. So here he was, fetching kindling in the cold for the fire of a stranger.
He had run out for wood several times before, but never on a day quite as cold as this one, and never before without his mantle. He had forgotten to snatch it up as he scrambled out of the servant’s quarters, and he had not dared to turn back upon noticing its absence.
The boy sighed. To his right towards the near horizon, peering through the breaks in the rows of trees, he could just make out the sky-stained echo of his old village. A thatched roof here, a gentle firelight there, the dark shapes of animals wandering into their pens for the night. Perhaps he could go home instead – turn away from the clear-cut path and pick his way through branches and brambles, towards the lights bobbing on the horizon. Even amid the wind and the cold, a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth, and he sighed again into the frigid air.
He was cold and alone, and suddenly he told himself that, he would go home. The lord did not matter; money did not matter; the ox did not matter. All that mattered was himself and his family, and he was going to see them tonight.
He would stroll down the familiar path to his cottage, and his mother would catch sight of him as she dug up cabbage to put in the broth for supper. The world would be bathed in subtle blue, soft and silent as the evening light, and her hands would go up to cover her mouth and her eyes would shine. She would run forward to take him in her arms. She would insist that he stay.
The sun sank lower in the sky, the fiery sunset swelling up into a penetrating gray, then a lonely blue. It was colder now than ever, and the boy realized that he could no longer feel his arms. At least, he thought, I will have the fire when I get home. The thought comforted him, and he walked faster, thinking of his mother’s embrace.
He came to the cottage now, and he froze, for he could see them through the window. The seven of them – his mother, his four sisters, his brother, and the baby – sitting around the table. The fire was crackling in the corner, silent and safe, and they were talking and laughing…and they were all happy.
And suddenly, he could not bring himself to knock. The rain began to fall now, all at once. It pounded on the ground like a fist, running down his face and seeping into the fabric of his shirt. He could feel it hitting his shoulders, and the cold seeped through his skin and down into his bones. It soaked into the gray fabric bundle in his arms.
            Slowly, he turned around and trudged down the muddy path, through the shuddering fields, back into the woods and towards the manor. He walked for a long time through the cold and the rain, and then came to the manor gate and knocked.
            The door opened, and the boy, shivering, thrust the soaking pile of kindling into the cook’s arms. She took it from him, a smirk frozen on her lips as she took in his state. Then, without a word, she stepped aside to let him through. He rushed forward, sighing at the slight burst of warmth, and immediately stripped off his soaking boots.
The lord regarded the boy silently. He was cold and shivering, and his eyes were misted over with a quiet contemplation that the lord mistook for wistfulness. The lord felt a sudden stab of guilt.
“Sit, boy. Warm yourself by the fire.”
 

​Look with me, reader. There! Do you see it? Far, far down beneath the rolling clouds, there is a walled-in, closed-off, town. It is miles and miles away from the twinkling cities on the coast, and there are no lights here. No streetlights, no flashlights, no book lights -- not even a single candle. The windows are all small and square-shaped and shut tight against the cold, and every last one is dark.
 
All except for one. Yes, at the very heart of this little dark town, there is a single window that is full of light. And beyond that window is a bedroom, and within that bedroom is a boy. His name is Peter, and in his right hand he holds the only light in his entire town, and in his left hand he holds a book.
 
Soon, my reader, we will come back to him, for this is his story. But first, let me tell you about his world.
                                                  ****
 
Peter’s little town was a rather terrible place to live, although no one living there quite seemed to know it. The weather was always cold. The colors were mostly dry and dull. The people were mostly dry and dull. The books were mostly dry and dull, and all filled up with nothing but ordinary facts. Every morning at sun-up, every last grown-up picked up a big beige briefcase from beside their front door and began to push through the long streets of the town, to their factory or their station or their office. Every night at sundown, every last grown-up pushed back home through the streets in more or less exactly the same way. It was quite useless for anyone to stay at work past sundown, seeing as no one could see a thing in the dark. Much to the confusion of the founders of the town, not a single form of light, man-made or otherwise, had functioned inside of the wall for nearly three centuries (except, of course, for the sun and the moon, which will always cut through even the darkest of darknesses). And so, from eight at night to six in the morning, the town could do nothing but sleep and wait.
 
Yes, the town truly was a horrible place to live. The night sky, always heavy with smoke. The children played, of course, as all children must. But they were only permitted to take part in organized activities, like golf and tennis and chess, and they were never allowed to imagine up games of their own. At school, the children recited their sums and their multiplication tables, and practiced their letters and their spelling and their definitions all day. And, worst of all, in the entirety of the town -- in every last home, in every last classroom, in every last library -- in all of these places put together, there was not one single storybook.
 
Peter, a rather ordinary little boy, grew up in one of hundreds of gray homes that were lined up neatly near the central square of the town. He dressed just like all of the other children. He spoke just like all of the other children. He seemed, for all intents and purposes, to be exactly like all of the other children.
 
No one knew what would happen, of course. No one can see the future. But even then, the signs were there, and those who looked closely could see them. Peter had always been the kind of boy who sat for hours and hours by the window on rainy days, watching the grown-ups pass by his house with their blue umbrellas and their brown coats and their plodding black boots. He liked to make up stories about them. Where had they come from? Where were they going? Why? He was the kind of boy who liked to watch them melting snow darken the dull gray stone of the front steps, and who saw shapes and faces and all sorts of creatures in the clouds.
 
Now, reader, I am sure that at this point in the story, you quite like Peter, and you want to be his friend. So, do I. But you must understand that the grown-ups in Peter’s little town did not like children who were not dull and serious and just like little grown-ups themselves. And so, it happened that Peter’s teacher called his parents into school to discuss his classroom behavior.
 
“Would you like to see what your son did on yesterday’s addition quiz?” asked the teacher, leaning forward over the desk and slapping down a sheet of paper with Peter’s name scrawled across the top in pen. She pointed sharply to a question about halfway down the page. It read:
 
4 + 7 = ?
 
There was nothing unusual about the question itself, and for a moment, Peter’s parents were confused. But then they saw what his teacher was pointing to: in place of the answer was a swirl of lines and shapes, scribbles that seemed to take on the form of wings and a beak and two short legs.
 
“It seems to be...a small, two-dimensional representation of some peculiar flying beast. It’s absolutely absurd!”
 
Here, I must pause to let you know that the curious figure that Peter’s teacher referred to as “a small, two-dimensional representation of some peculiar flying beast” was, in fact, a simple drawing of a bird. You see, since the wall had been constructed, no one new had come into the town, and no one old had left it. And so, while even the youngest children who lived there could explain the meaning of “algebra” or “monotonous,” not even the most learned members of the population were aware that the word “drawing” existed. No one in that town could have told you what the word “story” meant -- or “elf,” or “magic,” or even “prince”! 
 
“And, sir, while we’re discussing your son, I must inform you that he has been lying, as well! Yes, lying! He wastes precious daylight hours telling the other students all sorts of awful tall-tales, filled with talking birds, and walking trees, and singing flowers. As if flowers could sing!”
 
Now, reader, you and I know well enough that Peter had not been lying at all. He had only been telling stories. But in this little dark town, no one except our dreamer knew the difference.
 
Peter began to cry as soon as he and his parents stepped out of the school building. He cried all the way home, through his dinner, through his daily bedtime math problem and through his weekly bedtime spelling test. And at last, still crying into his pillow, the boy fell into a deep sleep.
 
In his dreams, he drifted up -- up, higher and higher, out of his bed and straight through the closed screen of the little, square-shaped window. His soft white pajamas glowed like butterfly wings in the moonlight, and he stared down in wonder at the darkness of the city as it faded to a speck beneath him. He rose up farther, higher and higher and higher, above the layer of smoke and into the land of the stars. There he wandered for hours and hours before falling back to Earth and finding himself on the shore of a beach with the twinkling lights of a city behind him. Far off in the distance, he could see the speck of darkness that was his home -- and all around it, beyond its wall, were other villages and towns and cities, filled with twinkling, laughing lights. He stared at those little lights for what felt like days -- he thought that they were the most beautiful things that he had ever seen. And then, he turned to the ocean.
 
If you have ever stood on a white-sand beach at night, you will know that by the time the stars come out, the water is warmer than the shore. If you have ever waded into an ocean in starlight, you will know that the earth feels soft and cool beneath your feet, and that the rushing waves feel safe and warm around your ankles. Somehow, the whole world feels closer by night than it does by day. Fiction becomes truth. Dreams become reality. The impossible becomes possible. As Peter waded farther and farther into the water, he felt all of this and more.
 
He didn’t remember quite how it had happened -- perhaps he had stumbled upon it embedded in the sand, or found it floating on the surface of the water -- or perhaps it had simply appeared before him. All he knew was that one moment, there was nothing -- and the next, there it was, in his outstretched hand. He stared down at it in the moonlight, the brown leather cover and the worn yellow pages. It was soft to the touch, and far heavier than any book that he had seen before. He stared for a few moments at the gold-lettered title. It was a single word, strange and beautiful on the page. A word that he had never come across before.
 
He ran a finger over the letters. Traced them, one by one. He sounded it out, slowly. “Fair-y-tales. Fairytales.” What more can I tell you, reader? He fell in love.
 
When he woke up, hours later, there it was under his pillow: the book, with its brown cover and its gold print and that one strange, beautiful word. And beside it, something extraordinary: a flashlight. His hand trembling, Peter reached out and flipped it on.
           
Light, the first light in three centuries, flooded the boy’s bedroom. In that moment, there was nothing that Peter wanted more in the world than to read those stories. And so, he did, cover to cover, with the town’s first light in three hundred years clutched tightly in his palm.
…
And now, reader, here we are: back to the beginning of our story, looking down on him from above the clouds. Do you see him? Do you see his light? There he is now, with the book in one hand and the flashlight in the other.
 
Watch, as he finishes and puts the book down. Reads it all the way through one time again. Then, all of a sudden, realizes that he holds magic in the palm of his hand.
 
Watch, as he runs to his father and shows him the book and the flashlight. Watch, as his father calls his mother. Watch, as his mother calls the mayor, and as the mayor calls the governor, and as they both come over to the doorstep at three o’clock in the morning to see it all for themselves.
 
Watch, now, as they all sit down to read, all four of them together, and the boy, too -- as they laugh and cry and let the words fill them up in a way that they have never quite been filled before.
 
Watch, as storybooks are printed and drawings are made, as children are told that they may play their own games. As the walls are torn down and the parents take their children down to the sea for the first time in their lives.
 
And watch, now, as the little dark town’s lights come on, all at once, shining there in the darkness like a thousand floating candles, drifting across dark, deep waters. Watch, as, for the first time in nearly three hundred years, it is not always winter.
 
You see? The world takes care of its dreamers.

​He stood with his back to the room, his face to the great arched window that extended across the east wall. It was the break of dawn, and he could see the sun rising above the towering skyscrapers, painting the sky a rose-touched periwinkle. He sighed and closed his eyes for a moment. He’d love to paint the scene—he pictured the way the oil paints would glide over the canvas, how the pale gray would blend subtly into the touches of golden and the lingering traces of clouds. The skyscrapers would rise up to meet the sky, firm strokes of black and silver, highlights in white and reflections in pale blue… I should take a picture, he thought. To paint later. He leaned forward and pushed open the window. It slid up smoothly, so unlike the stubborn, stiff windows in his own apartment, with their thin metal frames and cracked glass panels. Again, he sighed. He drew his phone out of his pocket. It had once been sleek and silver, but now it was caseless, a jagged fracture spreading over the silent black screen, the back covered in scratches. It took three attempts to turn it on.
He opened up the camera app and took a deep whiff of the air from outside. It smelled like the city, somehow fresh and polluted all at once. He lifted the phone and snapped the picture, then glanced down at it and wrinkled his nose. The lighting was wrong--all wrong. He slid the window up farther, and stuck his head through the frame, peering down at the asphalt road and rapid cars below. If he could hold the phone out the window, just so…
He narrowed his eyes in concentration and pushed his entire upper body through the frame, holding the camera out in front of him at arm’s length. He stared at the image on the screen for a few moments, contemplating it, then smiled.
Perfect.
Carefully, he moved to snap the picture, but just as he was about to, the phone slipped from his sweaty fingers. He scrambled to catch it, and in the process, he felt himself slide forward, farther out of the window. He gritted his teeth and grasped at the phone, teetering against the window frame as he struggled to secure it. After what seemed like an eternity, he grasped the metal surface in his fingertips, and he let out a sigh of relief. It was safe.
He realized it was happening a moment before it did. For a moment he felt himself suspended in air, free.
Then, he plummeted and he hit the road below with a sickening thud.

I can’t quite remember what it was about that story -- the crimson flash of the cloak, maybe, or the quiver of the lilacs as she scooped them from the soil, or the moon-stricken whistle of wolf padding through brush far beneath the darkening storm. But I do remember those dry summer nights, all paper and flushed watercolor and firm lines of ink. I remember how the flashlight trembled heavy between my fingertips -- how beams of light sprawled across the rolling covers when I lowered it to turn the page. Through the spun-silver curtain, the moon smiled down on us (the book and I, the two of us), its bright breath coursing on the wind.
I was there, in my bed, and yet it isn’t the bed that I remember, but a land doused in lamplight, swift and in concrete, with a population of one. Me, red with the cloak, sweet with the lilacs, moonlight-stricken with the wolf. Night by night, I wore the corners soft, the paper thin -- folded back the cover and breathed secrets to the spine. Even then, there was something in the words that I couldn’t help but love.
​

The door creaks once at the touch of her fingertips, then swings open in smooth silence. The room is at once sparse and lavish, empty save for the piano bench and the wooden harp and the pale, billowing bedsheet that hangs over the window in place of a curtain. Deep shadows wobble across the floor, shifting with each subtle breath, with each flutter of the air. This room provides no view of the sunrise, of the sky’s first blood-stained breath or of the rising wind’s fierce twist. Instead, it envelops her in darkness, in a heavy, early-morning gray that settles over the watchful air. The setting moon hangs in one corner of the open window. It laps silver at the legs of the worn leather bench, runs a firm gray hand down the wooden curves of the harp. She is reminded of how the gray tide slips ever further from the shore, of how white sand crumbles underfoot, cool and coarse between her toes, of how the earth rushes towards her as the waves pull away, leaving her ankles cold and her knees trembling.
The moonlight shrouds her shudders, winds itself around the rise and fall of her breath. She moves towards the window, ducks behind the sheet. It drapes lightly over her shoulders, wrapping her in its own pale world. Dying moonlight rushes in, tracing patterns on the pale cloth behind her, alighting on the scattered floorboards beneath her bare feet and casting her papery hands in soft, fragile white. She lifts a palm to the glass. It feels like wax beneath her fingers, soft and cool and lenient, as if it will cling to her form long after she is gone.
​

​I wake up in a sea of white. Blinding sunlight pours in through an iron barred window, casting dark, slashing shadows across my body. Stark white walls, grayed linoleum floor, and the voices are silent again. I take a deep breath, relishing the feeling of air swelling in my lungs. Breathe. Where am I? I look down to find that I am wearing a plain white slip, the cloth rough as paper against my skin. Who am I? I close my eyes and fall back into the darkness.
Not much registers that first day. Women dressed all in white come in and out, bringing trays back and forth and, every so often, murmuring a comforting word. They change the sheets and bring in meals, which are always accompanied by a thin paper cup and a pale blue pill. The pills numb the pounding in my head, but I feel sluggish when I swallow them -- like my mind is encased in a thick, soapy film.
            The next time they come in, I ask them why I must take these pills. They tell me that I am sick. Can you believe it? Sick! What a terrible lie. When I am sick, I feel tired and flushed and empty in my stomach, and as I do not feel any of that, I cannot be sick. At least, no more than I can be insane.
Days pass, months, perhaps even years. I do not know; time is all the same in this place. After a while, I am allowed to wander the halls, and then to eat meals with the others, and then, finally, moved into a room without bars on the windows and the door. The food here isn’t bad, to tell you the truth -- actually, I rather like the mashed potatoes that serve in the dining area. I’ve met some new people, too. They’re nice, if a bit strange. There’s a man who believes that his skin is made out of tissue paper, and an old woman who has four different people inside her head.
The women in white are everywhere. I thought they were nice, at first, but I soon realized that they are not so much polite as distant, and not so much caring as formal. They may be kind, but it is a cold sort of kindness, abrupt and never enough to fill you up.
When I ask them why I am here, I am met with swift buttered smiles and wandering glances. Their laughs are strained, and lies spill from their lips.
I find them strange, so strange -- even stranger than the other people here, sometimes. They are marionettes; their movements and their words and their thoughts are wooden, and I long for people made from flesh and blood.

The glass glows blue under the strobe lights – so calm, so blue, so cold and fresh. Trembling beads wash down from the lip and break the smooth waterline, one by one, one with each thump of the music against the soles of my feet. My whole self turns with the pulse and squish of that stereo. Stomach jumps, up and down and up. Bones in my hand jitter. The little umbrella stirs and blows loosely in the glass.
You know, I have this image in my head, and I can’t shake it, of all these people – umbrellas and hoods and newspapers – skittering down the New York street like raindrops down a window. They’re looking down, down, down, always down. I’m looking at them, not from the street, but from above, in a building, and in a yellow raincoat. So high that the raindrops are wider than the cars, that the people are only pinpricks. I wonder if they’ve ever looked up and seen me, or seen the clouds roll home.
And, you know, once I sat in front of the glass, a pen in hand and the crashing rain before me, and I got it in my head that I would write it all down, every drop – only, I touched down that pen to paper, and all that came was a little blue dot. No words in my head clean enough to show you how it fell, in patters and stones and soft sizzling sheets. None playful enough to show you how it landed, the sighs and ripples, the drumming rings. The empty page – what a world. White as the wind – this still, raging white – and hollow as the prickling stars.
So instead, I stood up and I pressed my nose and my own two hands to the glass, for so long that it grew warm and waxy under my fingers. It started thinning, the glass, like it was melting, only softer. And I think, just maybe, I fell right through and became the rain.
​

One autumn night, as the heavy blue of dusk cut through the sweet golden of sunset, a single white tulip arose from the dusty riverbank and caught sight of her own silken reflection in the still, breathy water of the river. It was the night of the new moon, and as the low clouds around her dissolved into stardust and the heavens above her crumbled to black, the tulip turned her delicate head this way and that, combing down her brilliant petals and admiring the way that the last star of evening graced her slim form with swift lines of silver. It was not until the trees shifted and darkened the sweet spell of starlight that the flower, at last, seemed to notice the lively woods around her. Slowly, she turned up and took in the long forms of the trees and the flitting of the lightning bugs and the slipping shadows on the grass. She turned at once to the great oak, who had lived in the forest for many seasons, and knew much about the world.
“Aren’t I beautiful?” she asked him. The oak, awed by the pristine ivory of her petals, smiled and dipped his branches gently at the next touch of the rushing wind. But the flower did not see, for she had already moved on, peering beyond the oak into the open night.
“Aren’t I lovely?” she called to a young lilypad, who had made his home a little way up into the water. The lilypad, quite taken with her melodious voice and her delicate perfumes, blushed furiously and ducked his head under the froth of the river. But he said nothing, for when he surfaced to tell her that he loved her, he found that she had already moved on. ​

​Even through the threadbare curtains, Sam can see the traces of frost creeping across the window glass, throwing slivers of moonlight across the hardbound book in her hand. She doesn’t check the spine for the title.
Shivering, she tugs on the sleeve of her pajamas. The wind outside has grown fierce, gnawing at wood and flesh alike; winter has finally arrived. Branches groan against the walls of the house, as if to escape the frigid air, and she sits cross-legged on the hardwood floor, listening to the sound-filled silence.
The room is dark, and her head is pressed back into the side of her desk. Her wire-rimmed glasses, bent ever so slightly out of shape, lie discarded on the ground beside her. She traces the cover of the book in her lap. Its corners are well-worn, curved inwards, and almost reverently, she runs a finger down its pages. She smiles as the moon washes her hand in silver light.
Even as her heart tightens, breath comes more easily, and her shoulders sag. Already, she can feel her own worn-out world trickling away through the cracks between the floorboards, hear new existences blossoming at the turning of a page. Already, she can taste escape in the air.
She draws a breath through her nose as the fresh scents of dust and paper trickle up from the pages. Sleep holds down her eyelids, and she still can’t remember what book it is that she holds in her hand. Only that it is the one she fell asleep meaning to read, and the one that she turned to, hours later, when she sat straight up in bed, choking down a scream. Reading by moonlight has always been her remedy for a nightmare.
And for her first failing grade.
And for her grandfather’s death.
Scratch that--reading by moonlight has always been her remedy for everything.
She’ll have to go to school tomorrow, and she’ll have to go to sleep soon. But for now, there is only her and this book. She hopes that she will lose herself somewhere in the pages, in a world away from this one; she hopes that when she returns, she will be a little more whole than before.

But I still remember
Scribbled notes on orange post-its
Flicked across a desk
I remember making faces at friends across crowded rooms
And laughing when they finally noticed
And I remember when we ran in circles against the wind
Without a care in the world
I remember when we became dragons.

Read the full poem here

     It’s been a while since we left.  The sun should be well into the west by now, casting shimmering streaks of pale pink across the deep blue evening.  Would be, if it weren’t for the huge wall of pure black that spans across the horizon, spreading out slowly, steadily, casting its looming shadow on the world.  The crowd surges around us.  As far as I can see stretch faces, people, some pushing ahead of others, some lagging behind.  Blond hair, brown hair, white hair, dark eyes, it all blurs together until the faces stop being faces at all.  Every so often I think I see someone that I recognize, but when I look again, they’ve turned away, vanished into the crowd, and I tell myself that it was just my imagination. 
I don’t remember when I offered to take Caecilia from Mother, or when it started feeling like I was holding a sack of bricks instead of a child.  I pull my sister closer to me and continue to walk forward, trailing Mother’s dancing shadow, cast in the darkness by the vague flicker of a candle instead of the ever burning sun.  Mother glances at the sky, swallows, and increases her pace, pushing through the crowd.  We keep walking.

Read the full story here

Growing up, there were four boys on my street, all of us about the same age. Danny, my best friend from birth and the clown of the group, with his dimpled smile and his freckled face. He went on to be the only one of us to enroll in the army, but at the time, he was a mop of hair, haphazardly parted and falling into his eyes when he ran. There was Jacob, the youngest of us and something of a tagalong, who went on to become a famous movie critic. There was me, the quiet one. And then there was Evan, who moved into the old house at the end of our street when we were in first grade.
            Evan was the storyteller of the group, to say the least. His eyes shining, he’d spin us golden tales about his grandfather, who had singlehandedly led the American Army to victory during the Great War. He’d swear on his life that old Mr. Dupont was a Russian spy, and he’d speak in low whispers about the time he’d seen a dragon on the horizon as the sun disappeared over the edge of the woods. Being seven years old and new to lies, I hung onto his every word like a precious stone.
My favorite stories were always those about his father. “He’s a pilot,” Evan would say, his back straightening and his mouth going stiff, “and he owns three planes, and he flies ‘em all day. He ain’t got no passengers, no one else with him. He’s up there all alone up in the air, jus’ like a bird. Every day.” Once, he had flown right across the Pacific and skimmed the top of Mount Everest with his wing. Another time, he had broken right out of the earth’s atmosphere and scraped against the edge of the moon. In fact, he was so busy with his planes that he was rarely home. “But I don’t mind,” Evan told us. “He’s the best Dad in the world.”

​Read the full story here.

 I have my back to him, but I know he is here. I thought perhaps he could only visit in my dreams. But I can see the shadows on the wall shifting with his every breath, hear him shuddering in the winter air, blue-skinned and cold-eyed and drowning in shadow. The cold gnaws at the back of my neck, and I can feel the trails of water running down his face, hear them dripping onto the floor and pooling at his feet.
 I close my eyes. Breathe. I need to breathe. I must take in air, must brace myself for the voices. They are only murmurs, now: whispered fragments grasping at something they cannot quite reach. But they will grow louder, as they always do when he visits me, bubbling up in my mind and hammering into my spine. They grow and weave, washing over one another like coursing waves, but I can never figure out what they are trying to say.
I suppose ghosts have the right to haunt those who have wronged them, but his presence still unnerves me. I do not want him here. Go away, Luke. Please.
 Nothing; I can still hear his breathing. Must I turn and face him? I cannot bear to see what he has become--
Please, I try again. Please. I’m not ready.
A moment, and then he listens. I can hear his breath wilt into the air as he fades. It’s a soft sound, gentle, like the breath of air that kills a flame.
Silence follows, and then the raw cry of the wind. I open my eyes. The shadows are still; the street lights pour in through the windows. I sigh and rest my head against the windowsill. The painted wood is cool against my cheek, and I feel an urge to sink into it and never wake up.

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The white paint has been peeling ever since she layered it on, and it clings to her palm when she brushes against it. She doesn’t mind it; she likes to think of the small white flakes as lost thoughts, snatched up in the elusive tide of memory.      
But when the afternoon sun streams in through the window, it’s not the paint that it catches, but the solid oak underneath, and she finds herself wishing that she could crawl underneath it again, wrapped in thin sunlight, listening to the sound of her father’s loafers tapping against the floor. Even now, it smells, ever so faintly, of honeysuckle.

Read the full story here.

​The slipping shadows are slick and warm, and soft and thick as cotton, and they guard him against the still, damp lights of the stars. They wrap around his dangling ankles, around legs too small to reach the ground, around his round-eyed face and his drumming fingers.
She wonders if the case in his arms is stolen or his own, if the smudges on his cheeks and forehead are oil or coal or only shadow. She wonders why his fingers tap so furiously the wooden seat.

He’d been the first one to speak at her funeral. It was an odd crowd – a few of her friends from Church, three or four ex-students, an obscure European cousin who she had lived with for a few months in her thirties. He shouldn’t have spoken – he was the least qualified of them all, really. He and Lillian were strangers, had been for all but the first ten of his fifty years. Strangers who shared blood, but strangers all the same.
He’d prepared a story for the podium – some made-up gibberish about the innocence of childhood and Lillian nursing a tabby cat named Juniper back to health. He can’t imagine his sister actually doing anything of the sort, can’t even remember how the story went, but it had brought the meager audience to laughter and to tears, and after receiving heartfelt condolences from the majority of the room, as well as the odd bouquet, he was sure that he had played the part of loving brother reasonably well. He wonders if he should have brought flowers with him today – roses for love, lilies for peace, poppies for remembrance. That’s the point of it all, really – remembrance. She was loved, flowers call out to passerby. She was needed. She will live forever in our hearts. But that would be a lie, wouldn’t it? He can’t conjure memories of a stranger; can’t offer her the mourning she deserves.
At last, he comes to the end of the graveyard – to a clean, chiseled stone standing straight among the forgotten and decrepit. Fresh dirt clings to his shoes as he moves towards the tomb – pale gray, almost hazy under the curtain of descending night. Slowly, he runs a finger over the name. The stone is cold, and the hard line of the L leaves an indent in his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. 
Read the full story here

The night sky seems to buckle under the weight of smoke, and his voice seeps into the cobblestones, golden notes lingering in the firelight long after they are gone. Though his words are barely whispers, barely bursts of breath in the darkness, there is a sorrow in the touch of his voice. It wraps around each shuffling footstep. Each passing car.
He sits on the curb, perching on an overturned paint bucket just under a flickering gas light, and though his tune is familiar to all who listen, it is his own. Some do not see him; others cast furtive glances as they pass by. First to his guitar, to worn-smooth firelight coursing through wood. Then to his hands, trembling against the strings. And, at last, to his face. Skin like wet paper, clinging to protruding bones. Chapped lips, whispered words. Pale eyelashes, fluttering in time to his song.
And, quickly, they look away. Something about him unsettles them; perhaps his tattered clothes; perhaps the pain that lurks in the silence between his notes. Perhaps it is only his luck.
Some glare; others speed up and pull their children closer. A few search for a donation box. They fine none.
An old man frowns as he approaches, pulls the cigarette from his lips. His footsteps pause, and his breath draws circles of smoke in the air. He nods, slowly, and slides a dollar into the palm of the singer’s hand.
The singer hands it back.
Winter takes a brush to his lips, painting them blue, and his hands tremble against the strings of his guitar.
He sits with one leg outstretched, and every so often, his voice scrapes. His notes grow sour, his words catch, and he pauses. Opens his eyes. Looks to the sky, and finds only smoke.
And still, he sings on.
​