It was a dark and stormy night. Theresa sat in a circle of candles in the middle of her living room's hardwood floor, reading. As much as she had been looking forward to this book, though, its reading really needed electricity. She should be trying to get lost in something like Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, not Girls' Poker Night.

The kid upstairs was crying. His father, trying to calm him, stepped on something and said a word that the newly verbal toddler would undoubtedly repeat at the most inopportune time.

And the couple next door… Well, what was new?

Maybe she should have seen it coming. They had been together for a long time; things between them had gotten stale.

Oh god. It was her fault.

She'd been resistant to change her life. The most unexpected events for her were the car's hiccups, and even those were never really a surprise.

He'd tried to change enough for the two of them, to compensate for her unwillingness. He'd gone to school, changed careers, moved in and out of apartments and houses.

Finally--desperately?--he'd proposed. She'd accepted. But she refused to set a date.

How had this not happened sooner?

The sun is setting, chalking the sky dusty shades of pink and orange and blue. No clouds.

The houses in this neighborhood look unoccupied, but not entirely empty. Perhaps the cars parked on the street give that impression. Still, nothing on the street moves. No cars, kids, stray cats, birds in the trees… Even the paper pieces and plastic bags that used to be carried down the street by short-lived breezes have disappeared.

No outlines of disintegrated humans shadow sides of buildings. At least those would leave a clue. But no. For all you know, we were abducted by aliens.

"So," he said, trying not to watch the waitress walk away. "So, umm. How do you know Jack?"

Misty met his gaze ironically. "Through a friend. Much like this." She glanced in the direction of the waitress. "Nice of you to so pointedly not look," she added after a moment.

"Look, if you don't want to be here…"

"I didn't say that." She quirked an eyebrow and glanced toward the waitress again. "I'm so glad you felt it necessary to order drinks immediately."

He realized that her sarcasm was playful. Dammit. He loved sarcastic women. Jack should have warned him.

Her mind was floating contentedly in that drifty place that feels like floating in a gentle warm stream in the early summer. Her husband, a solid, reassuring weight next to her, was already snuffling into his pillow.

That's when she heard the tapping. Over her head. Not like someone was pacing directly on the attic floor just above her head, but like there was someone pacing on cardboard or thin insulation that had been put on the attic floor.

"Where are you? ...know you're here…" That came from the body that belonged to the footsteps.

He was on the roof.

She hopes he'll see her. She looks incredible; he needs to know what he's missing.

They'd broken up four months (three days, eight hours, fifteen minutes) ago. The days at first had been unbearable; (tick-----tick-----tick-----tick): countdown to his coming to his senses. He'd do it with flowers. (She'd walked by indifferently when secretary Trina got flowers the other day….)

She'd forgotten how much fun she could have spending weekends with her friends—weekends away from the city; she'd almost forgotten there were places other than her apartment or his.

It had taken forever to get over him.

He drove through three lights before he began paying attention to them. He hadn't planned on this. He made random turns.

The gravel in her driveway announced his arrival, but she didn't appear in any of the windows. Slowly, purposefully, he made his way to the door. He pushed the doorbell with his keychain.

She must have seen his car; he couldn't believe she would just fling open the door at this hour.

Or maybe she was expecting someone else.

"Jay," she said, surprised. "Did you-?"

Levelly, he met her eyes and growled: I'm not ready to go home yet.

I don't know how it happened. One minute he was standing there, and the next he was gone.

He likes to think on the roof. Liked to think. Sometimes he'd spend hours up there. Sometimes I joined him, and we'd just sit and look at the city lights and pretend to see the stars.

When I got there tonight, he was sitting on the ledge; he does, umm, did that sometimes. I never worried about it. I feel so stupid. When I asked him about dinner, he stood up and turned to look at me. He looked so lost. Empty.

No amount of screaming, begging, kicking could change her aunt's mind. Those glittery red fingernails had dug into her soft four-year-old's flesh and dragged her through the house, up the stairs, until they stood in front of the door.

The other set of scarlet nails reached for the faceted glass doorknob… The talons in her arm propelled her forward, and before she could whirl around to attempt escape, she heard the lock slide into place.

Swallowing a whimper, she let her eyes trail upward to face the soulless, envious glares of the glass eyes, made more malicious by the moonlight.

She knew it burned with the same detachment she knew no one could ever know about this moment, this instance of weakness of character.

That's what her daddy called it: weakness of character. Always in others, never in himself. Always, always in his wife and children.

Her mama had tried to leave him once. She'd kissed and told them eight times she loved them before turning out the light and closing the door.

She managed to stay gone for two-almost-three days.

Mama cried the whole way back because she wouldn't leave them there. Weak to leave. Weaker to come back.

He wondered what she watched through those sunglasses. Every day she passed him on the sidewalk on the way back from class—he thought she was a student, but she could have been a very young instructor. She wore sensible jeans and sweaters, and whimsical jewelry. Every afternoon he thought she'd smile at him, as she did when she occasionally passed him in the morning on the way to… wherever she went on campus. But she just kept walking, refusing to acknowledge anyone she passed. He tried not to be disappointed, but for some reason, he wanted that afternoon smile.

He picked idly at the seam in the toe of her sock as the movie played through its sappy lines. She was engrossed, and didn't notice that he wasn't watching with her.

Her socks were new. She loved fun socks. He loved that she loved her socks; such little things could make her smile randomly throughout the day. In the middle of their second date while they were reading movie posters from the line, she'd suddenly grinned at him. Kicking her foot up on the rail, she'd pulled up her jeans leg, displaying purple socks covered in little green frogs.

He said that girls love him, that he's always had a girlfriend. I know girls always seem to fall for jerks (except for me; I don't fall for anyone, not really), but something about this guy makes my skin crawl. He must've been a slug or leech in another life. Seriously, I'm talking goosebumps and nose-wrinkling, shrugging-away kind of disdain.

Does this guy even know what personal space is? His face is close enough to mine that I can see pre-blackhead pores. I refuse to back away. If he thinks he can touch me, though, he's got another think coming.

The girl on the porch looked familiar. She smiled easily, but her foot rocked back and forth and her hello sounded muffled. How did he know her?

He asked if he could help her, and she held out a baggie of a white grainy substance. He looked at it warily and she chuckled as she explained, "Sugar." She said she was sure she would run out of sugar when she was least expecting it, and this way she wouldn't feel so awkward asking to borrow a cup.

Oh. Yeah. He knew her. The girl from two houses down. The watcher.

He knew every centimeter of her face within the first two minutes of seeing her that day in the café. The mole about the left tip of her lip; the straight, plain slope of her nose. Her blue-grey eyes that looked as though she were paying attention. After a few conversations with her—well, watching others' conversations with her—he wondered how much she was actually listening, and how she was thinking while she smiled and frowned and nodded at all the proper cues.

Sometimes he thought she would see him watching. He wondered what he'd do if she did.

She said I'd like them, and I did. Maybe not quite as much as she would have wanted me to. Reading them was hard because I knew I wouldn't be talking about them with her, over coffee in some little shop where her hand would be in reach.

I still have the books. She's a bookworm, she wants them back. When I do talk to her (less and less frequently) she asks about them, and I offer to return them… how about coffee next time she's in town? Eventually, I offer to send them to her, but I never do.

Lifeless. How can you give no voice to your thoughts? Why are you okay with coming off as mindless drones who write just like everyone else? Must every sentence begin with "There are" or "there is" and why do you feel it is necessary to add the words "I think" (or some equivalent) to sentences? If it's your paper, the thoughts had better be yours (unless you're borrowing someone else's and then you have to give the person to whom the thoughts actually belong to credit—awkward as that sentence is).

And remember what I said about using rhetorical questions.

"Why?" she asked

He waited. Was she kidding? His stomach jumped when she closed the notebook and looked at him. Without a word, she took his hand in hers, turned it palm up, and looked closely at it, tracing life and heart lines with her finger. He was sure that should he ever have the privilege of being inside her apartment, he'd see tarot cards and methods of divination books on her shelves.

Her question still hung in the air as she looked from his face to his palm, which she still held, now cradled in her own cold hand.

I got to hear Tim O'Brien speak tonight. He told us a story, and read some out of The Things They Carried (because the event was called a reading) and talked to us about writing and fiction and the meaning of words and the other meanings of words and truth (and Truth or the lack thereof).

There were high school students in the audience. Lucky kids. If I was still teaching high school (or middle school) and I'd known about this, I would have wanted my students to be there. Never pass up the opportunity to listen to a storyteller.

Maeve was instantly suspicious of my new neighbors from East Europe. She told me: Don't be too neighborly. I started to laugh until she somberly repeated herself.

I shook my head and told her she was being paranoid. Not everyone from the area is a threat to our national security (if there is such a thing).

She was worried about me. Don't flirt and give them ideas. After all, she said, they'll eventually go back, and though they adapt easily to American culture, they'll change once they're home again.

I told her not to worry. They're too young for me.

I'll never forget that first night. My heart was beating so hard I could barely feel it and the resulting perpetual head rush was some kind of sedative-painkiller for whatever mortification I was throwing myself into.

I wasn't skinny like most of the other girls. I had a voluptuousness that some of them openly scorned. The other new girl was in tears as she came back from her first shift.

With a sigh and a refusal to resign any part of myself to thinking that this was a denigrating job, I stepped onto the stage and walked toward my pole.

I am enchanting (frequently so). Why don't others see it? How do they not partake of the joy and awe that should accompany my every utterance?

I could chalk it off to lack of imagination. People with true imagination are few and far between. I don't want to hang out with video-game addicts. I want to spend my time with people who play video games to experience new worlds and become new people. I want the people I'm surrounded by to mourn the death of pixilated comrades and feel complete elation when they discover video games' god-like power of resurrection.

Henry James. A mythical name in the land of English departments. Both awed and feared, his pieces must be encountered at least once by degree pursuers. Having foisted it upon your already tediously balanced classwork, professors await gleefully the outcome of this weeding method.

Some students will crack under the pressure. They will flee, whimpering, the sight of "Daisy Miller" and The Turning of the Screw. Others will grit their teeth and somehow manage to conquer the obstacle.

My assignment: write five pages on the linguistic choices of four sentences from "The Beast in the Jungle" (given).

My teeth hurt.

He was the last person I'd expected to turn up at my door. I didn't even know his name, but I'd seen him in the lobby and on the stairs. He looked like a hockey player. I've always been a sucker for hockey players.

He held out a measuring cup as a show of intention and asked to borrow a cup of sugar.

A whole cup? I teased, ushering him into my kitchen. He didn't strike me as the cooking/baking type.

He asked my name, and gave his, and I suddenly knew he wasn't going out that door anytime soon.

A tarot card promised me magic. It didn't specify form, but it did indicate that this is magic I've been kind of avoiding because I've been told to, but somehow I've circumvented that warning from time to time and have tried every now and then to embrace it. Or at least experiment.

Another card told me to quit avoiding my precipice. I know what that precipice is. I quit my job to walk up to it and look over the edge. The card wants me to jump; I'll be okay.

Another card: I long for but am terrified of love.

"Have you ever noticed how the older men get, the more they start to resemble monkeys?" Her timing was such that two gentlemen in their 60's—one of whom looked very much like a monkey--walking by happened to overhear and scowl at her. She crossed her legs and let the short skirt show off even more.

"I hadn't noticed," I said. "But I'm sure I will now. Thanks for bringing it to my attention."

"Not all men, of course," she continued. "I'm trying to figure out which men will most resemble monkeys when they get older. Our waiter will."

Hey, Miss, can I have some water?

He was always on this corner. Old tee shirt. Jeans. Sunglasses. Two or three days' stubble. Probably unemployed. Homeless? Maybe, but I didn't think so. I usually smiled in acknowledgement of our mutual existences and kept walking, but today I offered my half-empty bottle to him. He looked at it skeptically.

Is it poisoned? You drink some first.

OK, I can see where this is going. Look, if you don't want the water…

Look--really, I just stopped you because you're so attractive…

Uh-huh. Yeah. It was a good time to walk away.

In the early modern days people had strange beliefs about dead bodies. My favorite so far is that if you walk a bunch of suspects past the murder victim, the body will let you know which man/woman is the killer. Not in a sit-up-and-point kind of way, but it was supposed to bleed from its wound or give some other such physical indicator.

Can't you just see modern crime shows doing this? CSI: Mr. Brown, you see how this body just started bleeding again from this gash in its throat? Well, the body identified you. Bodies don't lie, Mr. Brown.

The office smelled like incense, something spicy and foreign and pungent. She glanced from right to left and tried to take it all in. Her other TAs had all had their own offices—or had to share with another TA. But this…. Eighteen desks—most covered with text and library books—three computers, mailboxes… the department's refrigerator and microwave and coffeemaker ensured constant traffic. The walls were covered with photos, cartoons, postcards, festive lights, workshop flyers, and calendars. No wonder it took so long for her TA to get papers back, if he was expected to work in this place.

How do you hand me an obviously unproofread paper and expect me to pass it? I don't care that this means a fifth draft. If you were so careless as not to look it over for spelling errors, why should I think you put enough thought into this revision?

What do you mean, how do I know you didn't proofread? You've misspelled words like experience and terrible and portrayal. Anyone who knows that he or she a horrible speller should know to hand this over to a decent pal-editor.

Oh, and the most tell-tale sign: you misspelled your last name.

I, stretched diagonally across my bed, am wearing purple flannel pajama pants and nothing else. My pillow is bunched under the right side of my ribcage, and my breast is flattened against the pillow's edge.

Oddly, it's the sensation of old cotton sheets against my elbows I'm noticing. Soft, feathery. In contrast, the journal page occasionally comes dangerously close to tearing through the thin skin of my wrist.

I can see my pulse in that wrist when I pause to sort my next onslaught of thoughts.

There's a freckle at the left end of my ratio line. What's that mean?