Today was the day that Frederick Barnes hated most, pay day.

Yesterday was a better day. He had gone to the office and put in a hard day's work, scanning want ads, networking with past associates, and customizing his résumé for a few tantalizing leads he had uncovered. He hoped against hope that one might pan out, unlike the hundreds he had pursued over the past four and a half years. Not a great day, but better than today.

The really bad part about yesterday was that it was another day living the lie. He hated lying to his wife and children. He should have told them that the office was only a place provided by the state where unemployed workers like himself could sit free-of-charge and seek employment. It provided a postal address where letters of rejection could reach him and phones would be answered on his behalf as though he weren't unemployed. Prospective employers simply weren't hiring the long-term unemployed.

WE CALLED HER SUMMER. She was hot. Summer warmed up a room by making the other girls jealous and many young romances were torn apart when boys couldn't take their eyes off of her long enough to notice their girlfriends walking out. Yeah, she was that hot.

Summer was my date to the senior prom and we dated until I left for college the following September. 

I dated another girl at school and felt guilty when I came home for Christmas break to find Summer waiting for me at my family's home. They had invited her over. It was almost too late to get her a present, but I slipped my brother some money and he dashed to a store for something while I entertained her. My brother was a good guy. I could always count on him. She “oohed” and “aahed” when she unwrapped it and made me believe that she was genuinely pleased.

Don't get me wrong. I was happy that she was there that Christmas. I just hadn't expected it, and I blurted it out at a New Year's Eve party at my friend Bob's house. “You haven't dated anyone else?” I asked when we slipped outside to cool off.

“No, have you?” she responded.

I said “No” but couldn't look her in the eye and she knew. 

“Why?” she asked. “Why did you just lie?”

“I didn't want to hurt you.”

DENNIS RETREATED to his room in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. It was almost Easter. Mom was baking her traditional coconut Easter eggs. Dad was in the basement attempting to crack one of the tropical drupes. Yes, a coconut is neither a fruit or a nut. It's a drupe. Dennis had come across that arcane fact while searching for instructions on how to split one open. He found them, but his father refused to listen. His father never listened. Dennis wasn't worth listening to.

A sudden crash followed by extensive cursing wafted through the home's forced air ventilation system. The ducts of the house's force air heating system worked like speaking tubes in an old steam ship. Dennis could clearly distinguish his mother in the kitchen, baking her cake. His father vented his annoyance for another half hour, then came the silence. It was a dreadful silence. Dennis bent over his desk and tried to focus on his textbook. That must have been his father's fifth attempt and Dennis was prepared for the next phase of the assault. His father's angry footsteps, up from the basement and on to the second floor, echoed throughout the house.

HAROLD SAT ON HIS SON'S FRONT PORCH playing Monopoly with his grandchildren when the youngest, Jeremy, pointed to the sky and asked, “What are those, Grandpa?”

Harold looked up and saw the high wisps of clouds that had caught his grandson's attention. “They're called 'horsetails',” he replied.

Turning back to the game he could feel the boy staring at him.

“What do they mean, Grandpa?” the child asked.

“Mean?”

“You said that clouds tell you things.”

Harold chuckled and tousled the boy's hair. “You're right,” he assured the boy. “Those clouds tell me that there's going to be a change.”

“A change?”

A sparrow fluttered along the subway concourse. A cricket skittered along the juncture of the tiled wall and floor. One pixel in a mural-sized advertising display flickered. Motes of dust shifted in the vagaries of air currents stirred by a thousand passing feet, and Muhammad saw every detail.

He was alive only by virtue of the fact that the subway car that had fallen from the tracks and now pinned him against the platform was keeping his guts from slipping out. The paramedic assured him with compassion that he would die as soon as the emergency workers jacked the car back onto the tracks. Nothing could be done for him.

The jacks were in position but the operators delayed. They were hoping to raise Muhammad's wife on the phone so that he could speak to her one last time, but she appeared to be lost somewhere between cell towers, and he heard only her request that he leave a message.