I’m trying to lace up my boots, but I keep dropping the laces or missing the hooks. This should not be a problem, but my fingers keep shaking. I sink to the floor, lean back against the wall, and stare at my boots, their once-supple leather now cracking and crusted with dried mud.

“Katie?” says Mark as he walks into the hall. I told him he could sleep in this morning, finally, but he knows me too well. He looks like he’s been up a while.

I look out the window to where Montana and Buck are eating the first of the grass to push through the mud. It was a long winter.

Mark looks down at me and says, “I’ll feed.” He puts his hand on my back, but there’s the slightest edge in his voice.

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Take a room at a five-star establishment.

Dress nicely. Don’t worry about wearing the same shirt as yesterday; no one will notice.

Frequent the lobby. It’s a good place to size up your fellow guests. Drop in during the late afternoon, as this is one of the busiest times. Position yourself in a plush chair within sight of the front desk and observe the goings-on. Try not to stare—it makes people uncomfortable and only draws attention to you. Bring a newspaper or book to glance at occasionally, and you should avoid being mistaken for an undesirable or a voyeur.

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Will has a dream that recurs each night. It is a conscientious torturer, sauntering into the room, rolling up its sleeves, and then commencing to lash him with barbs that pass through mere flesh and cut his deepest self.

The dream is always the same—a procession of familiar images escalating to sudden terror that never diminishes despite the repetition. Only an inconsequential detail in the dream may vary each night—the color of her shirt as she looks at him and laughs, the last petty, unaware word weighing on his lip, the angle of the sunlight bouncing from the plate glass beside him. But the hardest blow of the dream comes without variation: The car swipes through his peripheral vision and throws her into the air. He sees the last expression on her face, somehow as still as a lantern held in the sky. Then she’s on the ground again.

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The town of Keyton aged a man quickly. With the coal dust and the unfiltered Winstons and the nights out at Iris’ Tavern, a man’s lungs burnt out by forty, the dry sun turned his skin to leather, the bourbon broke blood vessels like fireworks across his face. And if the meth got ahold of him, well, that was it.

Prison, in a way, had been better to Oren Barry. Temptation had been there, but it was harder to come by. A fifth of First Barrel that might have cost seven bucks on the outside instead cost twenty-one, two weeks worth of full-time labor in the machine shop, or worse, an owed favor.

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A puff of wind blows a certain scent my way. Not really meaning to, I turn aside from my intended route and walk to the brook. Sure enough, there are hundreds of them little blue flowers with the yellow centers nestled in the grass along the bank. My mind paints up a picture of the day, a hot June day pretty much like this one, when you and me found this old pasture and first smelt that candy smell. You was six, Davy, so I musta been just turning ten. We lay on our backs in the sun, listening to the brook babble, breathing in through our noses. You said, I think I musta died and gone to heaven.

My throat seizes up and tears wet my eyes.

If you was here you’d be trying to cheer me up right about now. Telling me about something funny that happened over at the hotel the other night, or lying through your teeth about how we’d leave this place together and make a fresh start.

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The first night my husband barks in his sleep I lie hopelessly awake, fixated on the pitter-patter of clichéd April showers against our grimy sixth-floor windows. Our rubber boots dry by the front door, our umbrellas drip in the corner behind it, adding to the warp of the wood floor. There was a moment tonight, after we had pushed through the apartment door together, dropped our bags and shed our dripping coats, after Matt took my hair in his hands and wrung it out, creating a small puddle on the floor—an infinitesimal moment when the playful smirk in his eyes sobered. Right there in the entryway he was going to broach the subject at last, and my blood drained from my arms and legs and heart and collected in my throat. It’s been two months, he would say, it’s time to consider our options, and when I’d open my mouth to respond, the blood would come gushing out. But then Matt bent down to peel off his socks, suggested we order in pad thai and stream a movie.

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My Grandma Romy died the first week of October. The night she died, my dad was parked in his recliner working his way through a case of Coors Light and watching ESPN while I did my algebra homework at the dinner table. A lady called—the same one, I just knew it—and all of a sudden he “remembered” he had to go back to the body shop and finish a Suburban. Bam, just like that, Lulu, pack a bag, you’re spending the night at Grandma’s.

That wasn’t the thing, though. He’s always dumping me at Grandma’s house. It was that fucking lady.

“Hey,” he said as I was putting up my math book. “Go feed the puppy before we leave.”

“He’s your dog, you do it.”

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Azer was one of the one hundred forty-four gods.

There were twelve gods in each of twelve kingdoms. Each kingdom watched over a twelfth of the Empire, and included a member from each of twelve orders. The numbers had an interlocking and inseparable harmony.

The great gods minded the capital city of Narra, but Azer was from a minor order, and so his province was in a distant flank of the Empire. Like the others in the peripheral orders, Azer spent much of his effort in emulation of his betters, loitering about the perfections of Narra, admiring what the great ones admired, and only distantly noting the ongoing patterns of birth, death, migration, war, prosperity, and famine in his own province.

This neglect was reciprocal, for even in his province, Azer was only a minor part of the pantheon. At best his name might be mentioned in a ritual—say the celebration of midsummer—but invoked with little hope or passion. He was known as the god of measurement, and so the lack of intensity was understandable.

And yet the crisis that tilted the gods’ hold on creation started with the love of one of the smallest of Azer’s subjects.

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The average life lasts 80.93 years. That’s 2,552,208,480 seconds. I’m 24 years old. According to StatsCanada I have 1,795,344,480 seconds left.

Now count the moments:

1. That talk you had with Ally in high school (900 seconds)

2. When you saw Dad cry (19 seconds)

3. When you had sex for the third time (1,380 seconds)

4. When you thought you had cancer (50,400 seconds)

5. The day Hansel broke his paw (8,280 seconds)

6. The first time you killed a bug, and got stung by a wasp immediately after (240 seconds)

7. When you lay on the hammock at your old house while it rained (7,380 seconds)

8. When Katie pity kissed you at prom (9 seconds)

9. When Marcel told you that you couldn’t be friends in elementary school (72 seconds)

10. When Anne died (201,600 seconds)

11. When Mr. Waldon told you that you were talented (10 seconds)

I have 23 moments in total. 545,178 seconds. That’s only 0.72 percent of my life that I’ve felt, or remembered. Only 0.72 percent of my history is significant. The rest of it I was just coasting.

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At the age of ten, Emma is kidnapped for a sixth time. Her brother, Noah, too. This time by two men: one, taller, in a ribbed grey turtleneck; the other one, darker, in wire-framed glasses. When Sister Nena hands over the paperwork, it’s the dark one who says, “Thank you, we’ll be waiting to hear from the social worker,” and looks straight at Emma and smiles.

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The month is July

Today is Tuesday

The date is 16th

The year is 2013

The weather today is hot

“Bill.” My voice is silly and fearful. “Bill, I’m sorry, but it doesn’t look like I’ll be able to make it for dinner. They’re not letting me leave.”

It is late afternoon, so Bill must be sitting in his chair with his feet up and a drink at his elbow. His reply is calm. “Uh-huh. Well, I would hope not. Listen, honey, let me just quickly remind you where we are right now.”

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Vincent sits on his front porch drinking his way through a sweaty box of Schlitz Tall Boys. It is a Tuesday afternoon and he has nowhere to be and no one who would care if he went there. So, he sits in a rickety metal foldout chair listening to the woman that lives to the left of him scream at her day care kids. The busted up sign in her yard claims it is a Spanish language immersion day care which explains why he only understands every fifth word. But, puta in any language sounds ugly.

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