WEST WINDS

He had some questions. He wondered if there was an edge to the universe. He knew it was expanding, always expanding. But way far out there, was there an edge, that you could fall off of? And what if the universe is just part of something even bigger? And all the stars were like grains of sand. Would its inhabitants be able to predict the future of earthlings, the way we can predict the behavior of atoms, when we split them? Can the flapping of a butterfly wing on a beautiful summer day cause turbulence in a heart? Does anyone know that there’s a star (called Sagittarius A star) dancing around a black hole in the center of our galaxy? If a powerful flare flashed out of the sun and caused a current to run through the earth and all the lights on the earth were dimmed, would the rhythms and desires of women's bodies once again be ruled by the moon? The tendency of an object to resist changes in its state of motion (inertia) varies with the mass (according ...

“When’s your last day?” the woman asked. “They’re giving me some time to wind things down. Get things tied up. Et cetera. Next week some time.” He drummed his fingers on the teak table, put his right ankle on his left knee and flicked his foot a few times. Took a sip of his bourbon and water. She’d never seen his face so tense, his limbs so jittery. “So what exactly did you say to this woman, this remark that got you canned?” “I swear, Meg, all I did was try to make her feel good by complimenting her outfit.  I thought it would cheer her up.   I knew she’d been struggling with some personal problems. I didn’t know what they were, I just overheard things in the coffee area. It wasn’t until they allowed her to ’confront’ me—he wiggled his fingers—that I found out that, I guess she felt her husband was being emotionally abusive. You might think that that would be an excuse for her being hypersensitive, that she might explain that. But that’s not how it we...

W e were dancing in the streets; I mean literally. Moms with babies in their arms and a glass of Bacardi and Coke in their hands, laughing and dancing to a car CD player. The teenage girls together over to the side  dancing , where the boys leaned on cars and cracked jokes and watched the girls. Little kids throwing footballs and running up and down the street after each other in the hot sun. We had poured out of our apartment buildings, all races, black, Mexican, white, Asian and Arab. Four families, six families, pairs of families who were doubled up in a one three-bedroom unit. There were houses on the street too, but those folks more just wandered out to watch. There was nothing so sure as being poor, and we were poor, oh yes. Those fools in their houses with their brown front yards thought they were rich--and I guess they were, compared to us—so they were scared because it was the rich folks who were dying from the virus this time. We all were just getting over the old ...

G retchen gave a moment of consideration to the idea of walking out the door, across the packed dirt yard to the sidewalk, and looking up and down the empty street. See if anything was happening, as  opposed to staying in her house, where nothing was happening, or about to happen. Instead, she finished letting Jake Tapper tell her the latest pandemic news, then stood up, walked to the window and looked out. There was her front garden, lush and green, the blue lobelia, the red geraniums. Orange poppies taking over the tiny meadow of tufted armeria plants with their long-stemmed pink globes. What was wrong with her? Yes, there was a killing plague lumbering through the country like a cruel Paul Bunyan, uprooting lives, defying people to restore the damage inflicted by its every footfall. Yes, it had plucked up her boyfriend, like picking up a mouse by its tail, and tormented him until he had to be driven to the hospital to recover. But why make things worse than they were, with dry...

I t didn’t take long for us to be on hugging terms. We  liked  each other right away when we met in the  writers’ group, and started meeting every week for coffee and feedback. It took no time at all to start sharing the private memories that we crafted into public stories. I was coming out of a ten-year marriage, I was lonely, and she was like a mother to me, except with more profanity, and she listened to me. So it surprised me for a moment, that gray day in March, when Helga recoiled from my embrace that day in the coffee shop. “No hugging,” she said “Oh gosh, sorry, I forgot. I just figure if I get it, I get it.” “Yeah,” she was smiling but I could tell she was nervous. “If I get it, I could die.” That was right before the ban came, like a wall clanking down from above. No leaving home, no touching your face, no touching at all. We talked on the phone, comparing notes and stories as usual. She had a cough, but “I always have a bit ...