“Stella, you’re clearly the creative type.” The smiling digital man flowed along the wall screens as Stella walked home. “So, check out StoryTeller Pro 5.0! With just a few prompts…”
She looked down to escape the relentless advertisement, but this street had freaking
Aria stared at her arms. Her scales were showing again. This time, they were dark blue. She squinted daggers at them.
Go away!
“Aria! Are you ready for school?” Her mom yelled. School. Ugh. She was one in one million, someone who held dragon
The rain was coming down in sheets, a reminder that some things can’t be undone. I stood in Stage 7, watching my team tear down the set where Vivian Cross died three months ago.
“Cut!” I’d screamed that fateful night, but the cameras
I couldn’t remember the last time I felt so cold. The temperature outside was part of it, of course. So was our agreement to burn only one piece of coal at a time. Coal wasn’t cheap, and it was only December 24th, with many
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Marley was dead. Each nail in his coffin bore witness to that.
It was a dreary affair, his funeral. There were no mourners—practically no living souls save the minister, two grave diggers, and Scrooge. Yes, Scrooge. Covetous old sinner! Preoccupied solely with why
“One hundred twenty-one, one hundred twenty-two, one hundred twenty-three…” Scrooge muttered, his thin lips pursed as he stacked the last coin. He paused, squinting at the desk with rheumy eyes. Last time he counted, there had been 124.
“Who stole my sovereign?” he thundered, slamming
Oil rainbows shimmered and plastic wrappers floated on the wasted pond by Harmony’s apartment. An olive-green beanie shielded her from the breeze as she stood at the weedy bank, strumming a lazy chord on her ukulele.
She turned to a cyclist who’d stopped near her. “You’d join me tomorrow, right? To clean this pond?”
Ethel Grieves knows people don’t really see her. Not past the limp, the freckled nose, the coke-bottle glasses. In the boardroom of Carmichael Holdings, she is just a secretary. The mousey little thing who files reports and pours coffee for men who sit in chairs too expensive to belong to them.
She watches their hands.
“Good news, Josh.” Despite Mom’s tap on my back, I kept heading toward Olivia, one of my sister’s bridesmaids. Madeline said the blonde was single, and a wedding reception was the perfect chance to meet someone new after my breakup. “You won’t have to spend this evening alone.”
“I wasn’t planning to.”
“What are you doing?” whispers Joe.
“Sleeping. Until you kicked me.”
“You’re a messed up sleeper, then.”
“Huh?”
“You keep playing footsie and stuff.”
“Gross. I’d never play footsie with a dude. Go back to sleep.”
“What kind of socks are you wearing?”
“Socks? Are you stoned? It’s like forty degrees in here.
Joe Enza was a practical optimist. Not in the way other people defined the term as they met with life coaches and plastered their walls with motivational posters. No, he was truly practical. He made his clients look at the proverbial glass as not half-empty or even half-full, but a hundred percent full.
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I was indoors but surrounded by snowflakes, my heart pounding. Did a blizzard wreck the roof? No, I was in a theater and about to perform in The Burton School of Dance’s 1995 production of The Nutcracker.
My best friend Jasmine was the Snow Queen. “Snowflakes together!” she stage-whispered, pumping her fist.
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