Each docked boat
is tattooed across its bow:

Cinnamon Girl, Hazel B,
Lady Lou, Miner’s Debt.

Low mountains
encircle the marina, the rock

And snow of each peak
patched like molting caribou.

VANESSA VILCHES NORAT
Last night, as I was waiting for him, I poked my head into the hole and saw a puddle. I hadn’t noticed it before. I decided to clean it up, so I took a broom to the stagnant water. Snails and moss had taken over the tunnel walls. A swarm of mosquitoes inhabited the pond.

I think it’s right to talk about it this way, that such stories keep a kind of territory, and you have to come into that territory to have them. They extend outward, too, beyond both place and time, the places and times such stories are made.

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming.

Coming down the mountain from the McDonald Observatory under a hail of starshine and black night—the darkest sky in the lower 48 states—the universe went on expanding around us, my companion and me.

Stand here, traveler. You have come a long way. Beyond this fence, something happened.

IRENE PUJADAS
“You need to take responsibility for your life,” F states. She finds it embarrassing to waste a Saturday morning on this nonsense. She then adds: “Do us all a favor and put an end to this circus—or, at the very least, sit in the middle.” You stay where you are.

MERCÈ IBARZ
Close, so close he can already taste it. This afternoon he’ll become the owner of a secret. But first he’ll have lunch with his mother, who’s waiting for him at the restaurant in the back of the Boqueria Market, and once he’s got her home safely, he’ll meet up with the current owner of a Picasso engraving and he’ll buy it.

JAMES K. BOYCE
A human hand reached into the burrow and lifted the downy chick into the daylight. A man carefully measured its wingspan to ascertain the Kid’s age: eight to fourteen days, old enough to self-regulate its body temperature but young enough to imprint on a new home.

K-YU LIU
The last thing I saw before I entered the building was her arm, which she held limply in the air as if she wanted to wave but the strength didn’t make it past her wrist, and I thought of the flag in Tiananmen Square when the August air was thick and breezeless, how high above us it hung, still and defeated.