I was a single parent with a Corolla much older than my eight-year-old daughter and a one-semester contract that paid $9500 for teaching 240 students. Times were tough but with a car, a roof, a job, and my daughter, I counted myself lucky. Still, I worried about money. Though it wouldn’t do much to diminish my anxiety or augment the pantry, I took on a night course, Wednesdays from six to nine.

I’ve inherited my mother’s penchant for a finely dressed table. She liked to host Sunday dinners with coordinated plates and placemats and napkins folded into fans or geese or artfully tied through decorative rings. I don’t go quite that far but I do insist on cloth napkins, and I love a pretty tablecloth. When friends come over to my house to eat, especially with children, they glance around nervously seeking paper towels, but if they pause long enough to peruse the table they’ll see that all are welcome here, even amateur soup slurpers.

Christ help Me, Myself and I. So I yap at Myself. It’s not important to even take note of it because who am I to judge Me? Over and over and over again the same thoughts rain on Me. Hold out the helping hands as Me, Myself, and I cross the rainbow. We walked to the bar, Me, Myself and I.

It was midmorning. I wore my slippers, pajamas, and a bathrobe. I felt as if a dozen caterpillars were crawling up and down my back. My guest knocked on the door. I opened it. “Anderson!” he cried. “What an extraordinary thing you’ve done!” I smiled. “Every room I’ve ever set foot in, recreated as part of this house. No small feat of time or money.”

Joe’s one-bedroom apartment was his sanctuary. It always smelled of fresh coffee and was clean, and bright, and free of clutter. He was surrounded by his books, and his records, and his framed concert posters. He had achieved a certain aesthetic that pleased his soul. He had created a place to heal. It was a pendulum-swing reaction to his life before the divorce.

How Oliver got into the back yard was impossible to know because the security camera’s angle didn’t show the sliding glass door or its small plastic latch that Elodie made a point to never leave unlocked. Just a grainy and highly saturated view of the side of the house where the kitchen window was and the stone walkway cut the dense ground cover, the bare and skeletal branches of a fig tree, and the pool, kidney-bean shaped and covered by a cardinal blue tarp.

Ron is sitting in a chair reading the paper when I wander into his barber shop, tucked behind a thrift store that leaks the smell of old clothes into the carpeted hallway. Ron sees my sheepdog mop and wants to make it clear he’ll have to charge me extra, because otherwise people like me who only submit to a shearing every six months would take advantage of him.

Rudy and I were headed to the annual autumn puppet festival — Puppetalooza — in Stratford, Ontario for the weekend. I wasn’t that into puppets, but Rudy said he’d drive and pay for the hotel room, so I went along for company. He had elected to be a puppeteer in this life and if I wanted our friendship to continue, I had to respect that, and to a great degree I did.

Dividends Phosphate was sitting on the third floor of his spacious and well-appointed abode with his beloved Affenpinscher Rags Hoolihan curled at his feet, sipping from a glass of Chinese deer penis wine and reading from the various jottings and other personal writings collected in Elias Canetti’s The Human Province (written 1942 – 1972; translated 1978) when, through the east facing window on the other side of the room, he saw an individual in a brightly colored yellow windbreaker and pink compression shorts jogging down the sidewalk across the street.

The clatter of the pesky crickets on his front porch and in the basement of his farmhouse kept Harlan Becker awake… or more than likely it was the dread of the day to come that was getting to him. Whichever, he tossed and turned while Alyona slept soundly beside him. How can she sleep? he wondered. She knows what a son of a gun tomorrow’s gonna be.

I’m standing up on the bus holding a strap near the back. It’s too crowded to sit down anywhere. Old crones bickering in Polish, sleepy-eyed third-shifters, kids curdling the air with their whoops and screams. One beautiful young woman with tears on her cheeks, and some ancient, hairless fellow with a seeing eye dog. The dog, somehow, looks bored. Meanwhile, I’m coming from a job interview for this position as a Bible salesman.

I told the idiots I didn’t want to be their king. Don’t even think about voting for me, I told them. You want proof they deserve their name? They thought you voted on kings the way you voted on presidents. I did not try to disabuse them of the notion. It was no use. They’re ineducable, individually and as a group.

Karl saluted the picture of the original Karl and Karla hanging on the wall of his dressing room, then slumped into a tattered, leather chair. It was a ritual he acted out after every performance. He removed his top hat, laid it on the dressing table, and wondered how many times he would get to do this in the future. Circuses weren’t as popular as they used to be.

The sky never got bright enough to turn the streetlights off. 4:30 p.m., walking on the sidewalk littered with random shoveled chunks that had half-melted then refroze, he presses the button on his watch cap, and its attached spotlight shines down, reflecting off black ice, showing him the way. The day had been so short, it was an afterthought, already banished, forgotten.

Mrs. White was old and not just by the standards of sixth-graders. On the first day of the year, she announced that this would be her last. Sandy Moore joked that Mrs. White wasn’t really married, that she got her name from her hair. Mrs. White’s hair really was extraordinarily white, the color of icing on a wedding cake only fluffy, like cotton candy.

Mouse died today. Who could have known. But sometimes, many times, it happens this way. You get a call out of the blue. Hello? Hello? Palmer’s dead. Palmer who? Palmer Fish. Someone’s alive in the morning, someone you may have even forgotten existed, and then they’re dead. I didn’t know what to do. Who to call. What to report. How to dispose of the body.

Shit shit shit. I’m materializing, I’m materializing — I am late, I am racing, I am — woof — yes, here. I am HERE. Wait, where is… ? Oh god. Oh lord no. How could I space? How could I miss the motherfucking memo for the SECOND TIME this month? To: ALL CLOUDS. Subject Line: Saturday - Not An Us in the Sky.

Mark didn’t hate marriage and family, but he was falling out of love with it. He and Pamela married young. Nineteen years old young. Mark missed out on his oats-sowing opportunity. Not just experiencing other women, but just time to figure out who he was going to be when he grew up. And then, almost immediately, they had the twins, Simon and Marie, who were now impossible-to-live-with, entitled, all-knowing, eye-rolling, temper-tantruming, teenage terrors, who routinely left the dinner table without being excused.

Five years ago, Fred Nielsen drove his Honda into town and bought Doc Fitz’s practice from his widow Sylvia. The Doc had been gone just over a week. Nielsen took over the lease on the office, purchased all the equipment along with what the brokers call Goodwill, which pretty much means that Nielsen paid Sylvia something extra for keeping all Doc’s patients.