The Emperor looked upon his reflection. “Oh no! My hair looks hideous,” he thought. “It looks to be in the shape of a poodle. I cannot see the beauty in the hairdo. What does this mean? I cannot be racist. I must lack exquisite taste!”

Rumpelstiltskin took Prince Florian home, and loved him, kept him warm, and fed him well. Florian traded in his gold jumpsuit for a cloth diaper. Rumpelstiltskin’s magic did not involve making breastmilk, so he did need to hire a wet-nurse with some gold he had spun from his rhododendron.

Sally loved telling people about Donald Turnupseed. Get a couple drinks in her at a party and she'd be off. It was at one of these parties, one we hosted at our place a couple months after she moved in, that she got to telling Craig Sommerson about Donald Turnupseed in the kitchen of our apartment.

Why, oh why did you sing that heartbreak solo through the empty halls during lunch period? Probably wasn’t the best move for someone trying to keep it low-key, but you couldn’t help it. Blame the hormones. Blame the trendy outfit and kitten heels begging to be paraded around. Blame the boy making you feel these things that can only be expressed in a slow female ballad.

The teams are sorted, and the sentiments on the fourth graders’ faces range from this is the best thing ever in the world to I’d rather be sitting in front of my Atari playing Combat. Nina is right smack in the middle of that neon spectrum—she’s way more athletic than most of the girls in her class, but she’s wearing strapped sandals and her too-tight pair of culottes, so it will slow her down for sure.

She spent hours sitting on park benches listening to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers with her legs crossed. She watched people with tote bags wander aimlessly, falling in love with trees and birds. Billy Collins was right about so many things.

“Look,” I say to him, without raising my voice, which is no easy feat. “I didn’t do it. I would never harm my wife. I’m telling you the truth.” That’s partly true, if I’m completely honest with you. Sometimes I feel like killing her. Like when she doesn’t fill the car up with gas, and we’re leaving in the morning to go camping. That can really be annoying. Set a person off. You know what I mean? I think you do.

The funny thing is, when I needed him the most, he left me. He went evil, which is the problem with vampires, I guess: lifetimes of emotional baggage, centuries of bingeing on patriarchy and abuse. I got him back but the blood had coagulated in the vein, so to speak.

“I have deduced from the signage that you’re quite concerned about shoplifting and yet, all things considered, do you really think anyone would be capable of lifting a shop as heavy as this one? To me, such a feat seems merely impossible.”

In the study, sunshine was everywhere: falling onto the arms of a leather rollaway chair; cascading onto a desk choking on a thick layer of debris—stacks of manila envelopes, three fountain pens, and an open notebook, its sheets gently fluttering in the breeze from the open window. On every page it was written: It was over before it even began.

Fern is outside at the edge of one of these days, watching the last of the daylight turn pink and disappear from a park bench, when Lucia calls.

“I can’t figure out why I feel like this and I can’t shake myself out of it.” Lucia says at the other end of the line, panic constricting at her throat, thinning her words.

“You don’t have to,” Fern says. “It’s okay.” And it is.

We met each other halfway. Then I was told to turn around, having a key necklace placed around my neck, and given instructions just in case things went sour. Minutes later we left. Typically, music boomed when we drove. It would spark sing-alongs and more questions about what I had been up.

I also lost out on meeting fascinating people who would board at makeshift bus stops, gas stations, or stand at roadsides. Them all predominately regular folk, the forgotten, and ill-defined. People who moved invisibly about, rubbing off on each other, with looks and dialects, in their quest for a better horizon, or somewhere familiar.

They met, they fell in love, they survived the war, and they had not a penny to their names and no relatives left alive. They did what anyone back then would do - they went to America.

The images of my day rose up in my thoughts, the near accident, the late patient, the car with the dead battery. I pushed the accelerator all of the way to the floor of the car, and the scream came out of my mouth like something not a part of me, the sound mixing with the sound of the engine and the tires bouncing over the gravel and rocks on the road. It felt good.

She climbed in and fastened her seat belt. The jeep engine growled to life and Roman stomped on the clutch and levered the stick shift. Nobody drove manual anymore. Karen glanced back at the backseat. Empty. Only the red-checked Pendleton blanket.

As we stood at the water’s edge, the borrowed sun climbed down behind Bear Mountain. We commanded time to be ours forever. Sheltered among the tree line shadows, Sam and I baptized ourselves Wild Wind and Fire Sky with holy-magic water from the river. Angry, powerful, ancient native names we believed to be so clever and brave.

The only reason Marcy had taken this job was that once she had announced to her family that she was taking a year off, they had insisted that she work. Without a degree, this was the job she could find. She was a fashion design major and had put together her portfolio online and had submitted it to an agency. The agency found her this company: Costbelow.