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Sunbeams

I’m not sure which matters more—where the seed comes from, or where it takes root and grows.

Zetta Elliott, A Wish After Midnight

To the Arresting Officer

You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”

Lost and Found

I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.

Luxuries

A foreign sports car, a Hawaiian vacation, a glass of water on a hot day

Timing

A broken clock, a chance encounter, a long-distance relationship

Misunderstandings

Missed calls, misheard lyrics, mistaken identities

Clean Breaks

Sonja wakes to a stranger’s voice in the boat with her. A man’s voice. A panicked moment passes before she realizes that it’s coming over the radio and not from inside the cabin. “Aidez-moi,” the man says. “Help. Ayúdame. Please.” His call cuts in and out between the fuzz of the handheld VHF’s granular static.

Fuel

Feeding the woodstove, siphoning gas with a hose, drinking endless cups of coffee

Athens, Revised

Perhaps you know where this is going, or think you do. I do not. I decide the man is just being hospitable, like all the Greeks I’ve met during my ten days traveling through the country. As we disembark from the ferry, he says he is a father, recently divorced, and was raised in Athens, where his mother still lives. He is on his way there to visit her.