I don’t remember very many specific things I said in college, but for some reason, I’ve never forgotten that phrase: We’re grown adults. Because as soon as the words had rolled off my tongue, it had occurred to me for the first time how close it really was. In just about a year, I’d be out of college and facing a future unknown.

“Well, my hobby since I was a kid has been magic, especially sleight of hand. Whenever the collection plate came around, I dropped in a dollar and palmed a ten or twenty.” Whoa! Smiley Mike’s reflection is looking pretty stern. You’re in scoring position, Ken. “Nobody ever noticed. I bought some sweet weed with all that cash.”

It was August. Jordan couldn’t remember past summers ever being this hot. It was as if Nature, seeing this new, prolonged hibernation of humans, had chosen to reset the polluted air by exploding it. Jordan lifted the bottom of his shirt and wiped sweat off his forehead. They couldn’t afford an air conditioner for the living room, his mom had said, until the next unemployment check. Summer would be over by then…

Salma was an imperious beauty, an established clinical psychiatrist, the first born of the four Azizi siblings and very much the apple of her father’s eye. Her steadfast refusal to get married even while her younger siblings all settled down had been extremely vexatious for Mrs Azizi and in the last couple of years even had the doting Mr Azizi deeply concerned…

We made it to the counsel table before the clerk said, “All rise.” While Judge Beverly Sanders entered the courtroom, Kara and I traded smiles. Hers conveyed a mild curiosity about our last-minute entrance. Mine returned a false promise that all was well.

So with that in mind three ladies from the Deep East Texas pineywoods, laden with high-mindedness and a vengeful spirit and loaded for bear, with a concoction of Devil’s brew itself, were about to be turned lose on the local Ku Klux Klan…

Vincent had invented the sunflowers, and he’d invented the stars, and he’d invented the hills and the fields and his bedroom; maybe it wasn’t so strange to think that he was inventing the rain.

She wore, not a lightweight mask made of cloth, but a half-face respirator with two filter cartridges, as though against a gas attack. She felt Alan staring and glanced at him, then turned back to hand the manager her payment.

My boots thud rhythmically on the flagstone path as I cross campus, my face cool and calm though my mind seethes with frustration. I’ve been telling everyone for weeks now that Marjorie’s out to get me, but no one seems to be making the same connections I am.

I sit back down on the broken car seat we use for a couch and don’t think about Papa and I don’t think about Sergey and I definitely don’t think about what Pan Zielinski just said. I put that shit clean out of my mind and I turn the game up to watch Bolsinero make another crazy-ass pass to Márquez… but of course he misses.