In the tiny room that’s used as a staff canteen in Halden Insurance, you take two Ryvita out for your lunch, snap one in half, then put the bigger half back in your lunchbox. Maura licks the egg mayonnaise that’s spilling out of her sandwich as she watches you slice a tomato. She’ll probably make some comment about you being too thin again. Her dark blonde fringe, sprayed to the last, stands up straight over her forehead, and you can see where the teeth of the comb were pulled through the strands. The rest of her hair is backcombed. She thinks she looks like one of the Bangles or something. The last time she gave you a lift home when it was raining, she played ‘Manic Monday’ and then fast-forwarded the tape to ‘Walk like an Egyptian’, doing the hand actions when she stopped at the traffic lights. Seán, your boss, asked her last week to tone down the hair a bit, look more professional when she’s talking to clients, not that her hair bothered him as such, he’d said, but she had to think of the company image. Most days she slicks her hair back with that wet look gel, but not today, as she’s heading out for drinks after work. Not that he’ll say anything. She’ll probably end up in Club Tempo after. It’s free in for women on Thursdays. Ladies’ Night. She’ll be dying in the morning again.

The kettle shudders on the countertop and clicks just as Seán walks in. His jacket is hanging off him. You don’t know why he always carries a copy of The Irish Times to the canteen each day. He never ends up reading it.

He nods at you, ‘The usual?’

It is midnight in Ponderosa and Nick Velasquez can’t sleep. The public doesn’t want him to sleep. It’s been like this ever since it hit all the big streaming platforms. The viewers stay up bingeing and he… well, he has been bingeing in his own way. With a bottle of tequila in one hand and a lit joint in the other, Nick wanders from room to room like a ghost in his own house. He shuffles through indents made in the living room carpet. Depressions from the furniture his esposa, Marcella, took with her when she left. Can’t look at my eyes without seeing our little girl. Nick pulls on the joint, its coal shifting from a deep cherry red to bright yellow in the darkness. He exhales a plume of smoke and walks down the hall, his sobriety trailing behind him. And just when things were getting back to normal. He’d gotten a job at a local taxi company, found a support group with minimal woo woo, hell he’d even gotten Marcella on the phone once or twice but then the docuseries hit Netflix.

He’s been circling the house all evening, like water going down the drain, each revolution getting smaller and smaller bringing him down inevitably to a single point. His daughter’s room. Everything is, more or less, as Carmen left it; Notorious B.I.G posters, a half-made bed and her diary open to a blank page dated June 17th 1995. Stumbling into the room, he squares off with the closet. A four-year-old Carmen wouldn’t sleep if the closet door was left open at night. She got scared that if it were left open, monsters from the dark could just walk on in. So being a good daddy, Nick made a big show of closing the doors and threatening any would-be monsters inside. It became a nightly ritual until at fifteen, her embarrassed protests hit home. Nick takes a swig from the bottle and wipes his mouth using the back of his hand. He’d asked her once why the monsters didn’t simply push the door open.

“Daddy,” she had said, “The handle is on the outside.”

My head has a liquid feel to it as I stumble down the street. The bottle of red wine in my belly making it seem like my limbs have become balloons, and at any moment they might float away. Next to me, Michael has a stupid whiskey grin stretched across his face, making it look all bloated and red. I know this is going to hurt in the morning, but right now I couldn’t feel finer.

“…an’ tha’s the crux o’ the matter, yer see?” says Michael as he narrowly avoids a collision with a telegraph pole. “The past ain’t really exist. Ya feel? Go get me histery, would ya? Go fine me a Caesar an’ ‘ave him explain the intrakacies o’ his Gallic expeditions. Yer cain’t do it!”

I nod slowly to myself as the contents of what he’s saying dissolve in my mind. “I get it, I do. What about his commentaries, though? Didn’t he write some grand propaganda about Gaul? That’s Caesar, in a way.”

“But yer reed them propagandas in the present, see? It’s not like he’s in the room with ya, lookin’ over yer shoulder.”

“True, true,” I say. “Michael, my friend, I do believe we’ve just discovered presentism.”

I met the Devil today. He was walking down main street, right by the undertaker in B____, which is a little town near here, and which, for obvious reasons, I’d better not name. I recognized him straight away because he had furry legs with hooves for feet. Well, almost right away, at first I thought he was just some guy in fancy dress, but who dresses up like that on Christmas Eve? Not only that, he clip-clopped as he walked, and who has an outfit with sound effects?

And he wasn’t alone.

He had at least two smaller devils with him. I say at least because although I can picture them now, the edges of that picture are a little fuzzy, so yes, two for sure but maybe three. I took them for boys out with their dad doing last-minute shopping, looking for something for their mom, so two fits the picture I have in my mind. But who dresses their kids up in fancy dress to match their dad?

I was so taken by the dad’s legs – well, all the way from his chest down, the more I think about it – and the clip-clopping, that even now his face is hard to place, but I’m pretty sure he was wearing a hat and when I picture that, I reckon it was a white cowboy hat, and with some horns on it too. Horns like cattle might have with black tips, although I seem to recall by convention they’re supposed to be goat’s horns. Besides the horns, the hat had a black band round it but wouldn’t you expect the whole hat to be black? Maybe that old black-hat white-hat thing isn’t true after all. Either way, horns on a cowboy hat didn’t make a lot of sense, even for a fancy-dress costume.

He’s on the shitter the first time I see him: pants around his ankles, shirttail hanging between his legs, eyes shut and mouth corkscrewed with effort. The guard admits me to the cell and locks it again once I’m inside. Before I can say a word, the prisoner hollers, “Hang on, fellas, here it comes!” and what follows is a rambunctious round of flatulence and defecation that makes me grimace. When it’s over he cracks open one eye.

“They never let me have cheese,” he says, “on account of what it does to my guts.”

Another blast echoes inside the toilet. His face is red and strained but he’s grinning now. I count five teeth, two of which are rotten.

“You must be Mr. Morley,” I say.

“Ain’t nobody calls me that. Call me Fuzzy. You must be the doc.”

His left hand is shackled to the bar beside him. He sticks out the other. In light of where he’s sitting, I decline the gesture. He just shrugs and scratches his behind.

“Sorry to get you down here in the middle of the night,” Fuzzy says. “I told ‘em it’s only the cheese. Doc Yardley knows all about it.”

Standing in a handstand, Jane arched her back and lowered her feet towards the head. Scorpion pose. She saw herself in the mirror, balancing in this challenging position. It was close to perfection… And she felt sick at the sight of it.

From the loudspeaker played the soft sound of Indian music. Lighted incense sticks were spreading the suffocating aromas of sandalwood and saffron. The yoga instructor strolled between the students trying the pose.

Jane came back on to her feet and rolled up the mat. Tears filled her eyes, but she kept them from pouring out with an effort of will. The instructor looked at her.

“I’m sorry,” she said and left the room.

In the locker room she sat down on the bench and hid her face in her palms. She has always loved yoga… After hour of classes, she felt renewed and full of life. And now even yoga lost its colors…

I am alone, standing on the crumbling back steps of the old church, my trumpet by my side in my right hand. The church cemetery, dotted with countless rows of neatly arranged headstones, descends gradually towards the slate grey sea. It is a raw blustery day in mid-April. The first buds have appeared on the wild roses that have overgrown the cemetery wall, and on the storm-blasted stand of oak trees beyond. A single white sail is visible offshore. The damp salt air carries a faint smell of decay, of seaweed and debris washed up on distant beaches. Far below, a small group of mourners is gathered by an open grave.

He and I were about the same age, from neighboring towns, but had never met. Still, I knew well the difficult choice he had been forced to make fifty years ago, as he graduated high school and began planning his life. It was the same choice I had faced, at about the same time. It was the same choice faced by the three others I had played for in the past year, dozens of others over past decades. All of them had chosen to serve. All except me.

Someone from VFW called me a few days ago. They know I play for Vietnam vets. This also is my choice. But, no matter how many times I play, it seems I can never make up for that other choice I made, so long ago.

One step closer to Freedom, the box read. It’s time to say goodbye to the stress of indecision and let your new Infinity System make decisions for you! Clinically proven to reduce anxiety, the Infinity System improves productivity and always result in the optimum outcome for you. Put your life in the hands of a higher power and find true freedom – the freedom to be yourself!

The box had sat unopened on the kitchen counter since its arrival that morning. Kiki sat on the chair in front of it, a lit cigarette between her fingers. A cup of coffee, untouched, had been placed on the worktop beside it some time ago. She didn’t know what to do.

This seemed to be a recurring feeling she had been experiencing over the last few days, and one she was getting used to. The decision that sat in front of her, however, was a big one. It had the potential of steering her life towards one of two very different outcomes. She didn’t want to take it lightly.

Her foot tapped on the leg of the chair as she considered her options again and looked back on the last few days leading up to this moment. She had been doing this much more frequently than usual, this tapping, ever since her original Infinity had gone offline. She was starting to think she was developing a nervous tic.

All people have had ill luck, but Jairus’s daughter and Lazarus had the worst. Mark Twain

Laz pulled the parka closer to his body, ineffectually trying to ward off the gelid wind that blew from the mountains. Argentina was supposed to be warm in late December, but in Ushuaia, at the end of the world, the temperature rarely rose above fifty degrees. “Today, not even fifty,” Laz mumbled. Talking to himself was just one of the habits that over the years had attached to him like fleas on a dog’s fur.

He had not come to this remote outpost to see the sights -- Ushuaia held little of interest to entice a seasoned traveler like himself; it was described in the tourist guides as merely “a sliver of steep streets and jumbled buildings below the snowcapped Martial Range” of the Andes. He was also not interested in a trip to Antarctica, or in hiking the steep trails of Andorra Valley or trekking to the Martial Glacier, a couple of hours from town. “I’m not athletic,” he told himself; not that his arthritic knees would have allowed him to go ambling about as he used to in his youth.

He had signed up for a four-hour boat cruise on the Beagle Channel that would take him to his goal, the area around the Les Eclaireurs lighthouse. Sailing along the channel off Ushuaia, the boat had passed by sea lions basking on the rocks, cormorants sitting on nests, fur seals, and other wildlife he did not recognize. On Martillo Island, the boat had come close to what the guide described as one of the largest penguin colonies outside of Antarctica. Laz had taken numerous pictures, although he had no expectation he would ever show them to anyone.

Beth never liked doctors’ offices—the white sterile surfaces, the antiseptic smell, the degrees pretentiously hung on the wall. Bob’s gently putting his hand on hers was comforting, but still she hated the waiting. Finally, Dr. Wilkins strode in, all brisk efficiency, and sat behind her desk. “Good news, Mrs. Stevens, your nausea doesn’t stem from anything serious, you’ve conceived in utero—inside your body. That means-”

Beth’s hands went to her belly. She had long dreamed of this. A child lived inside her! “That’s wonderful!”

Bob reached over and hugged his wife. The two shared a long kiss before he spoke. “We hoped you’d say that—our first child.”

“Excellent,” the doctor’s smile looked practiced. “I’m glad you’re both pleased. Now it’s a simple procedure to draw the embryo from where it’s embedded in your uterus, and we can recommend some fine womb farms to nurture it until it’s ready to go home as your child.”

Donald Smith got up at his usual time of six in the morning to go to work. He tossed on a plaid dress shirt and jeans, the programmer’s unofficial uniform. Getting his keys for his late model car and his wallet, he walked out the sliding door of his one-bedroom condo.

He was part of a development team at Canal Railroads. They were creating an AI to control the trains and rail switches. The AI’s purpose was to automate the trains’ running by making decisions usually made by an operator or engineer. The AI was in its testing phase, and on this day, Donald was tasked to put it to the ultimate challenge: The Trolley Problem.

The Trolley Problem refers to an exercise in ethics that goes like this: you have a runaway trolley going towards five people. The trolley can be diverted away, but the other track has one person on it. The trolley does not have time to stop for either. Do you divert the train?

I sat beside the bar rubbing my glass across polished mahogany and watching trails of moisture it left behind. It must have cost them a fortune to ship real wood way out to the Rim. It didn’t look synthetic. I looked over at the barman and he tossed his head, then went back to polishing the glasses. Real authentic stuff. I was nursing my fourth bourbon when the guy walked in.

He was a florid, heavy-set guy and I could just tell he was a salesman. He had the suit, he had the haircut, and he had the little case. Maybe things would have been different if it had been a different night.