"What does she do, then?"
"I’m not sure she works, if I'm being honest."
Nick sipped his coffee, tasting what he'd heard. A song by The Cure played in the purposefully-chic coffee shop Taylor had chosen. The decor didn't suit him but Nick didn't mind. Robert Smith was...

A summer morning is all your own.
A light heat mists in the air, gently hazing everyone’s goings-on to be that much more personal, lost in our own pathways if but for a few hours.
Where even obligation can’t weigh against your first acts of the day, as...

The Oldsmobile drove around the corner, nearly clipping the sprouting palm tree for the second time as it lapped the old adobe house for the fourth time that afternoon. Its smooth tires took the curb with a rumble that thudded throughout the vehicle.
The driver cursed, adjusting his rear mirror and...

I've always wanted to catch a fish.
To feel that tropical sun beating down on my brow, snuffing out my caucasianity layer by layer, with the headphones of the waves churning through my eardrums. Memories and plans of a shaded drink living simultaneously in my lobes, an unnamed tune...

"It ain't right."
"Fuck right. I can't stand it no more."
Merle took the cloth-wrapped pack off the counter. The flickering candlelight made the unit cigarette drooping from his lip dance like a black snake on the wall behind him.
"It ain't like we ain't got no hand in it," said Merle, his...

There was an empty boba tea next to her bag. 
That's really all she remembered, she told the police.
A younger-looking detective took notes purposefully, as though the ink itself could discern the truth of her statement.
She'd last seen the younger woman as she sat along the edge of the indoor fountain...

I bought a couch today. In the morning the internet led me to someone who had just posted a couch not 8 hours ago, during the night. Four hours later I'd gotten a Uhaul, navigated to this stranger's home, gone into their basement and out again with a brand used...

"Ten times the butter doesn't get you ten times the rolls, Matthew," Rolf the Baker chided in his honeyed-barbed tone.
Matthew still couldn't make any sense of what it meant. It bore the weight of wisdom, but coming from the flour-spattered, unshaven Master Baker of the Wilted Rose Patisserie,...

In quiet rows the serfs of the ocean deposited sun-painted shells and bits of stone upon the ivory sands. Shelled beasts, crustaceans, crabs all took to claw and carriage to dump their watery gains into storage piles.
No one knew why, for this is always what they'd done.

A rare sort of...

There were too many left, they thought. So they gathered the last of their belongings and wandered down the riverbank.
Too many flowers had sprung from the garden that morning. It had begun with the pinks and the purples and spread to the rest of the palette. Leaves and...