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A fifty one year old who has been rapping since cassette tapes clocks in on the night shift and tells every hungry kid that you can't buy it and you can't teach it, gray is the color of iron, and he is just warming up the fire.

A demolition operator hired to level the tower he grew up in for luxury lofts stops the machine, climbs to the fourth floor, pulls out the doorframe with his and his late brother's pencil height marks, buckles it into the cab, and then swings.

In March a Denver contractor named Gary guts her kitchen, takes half up front, and answers seven months of calls with two weeks, tops, blaming tile from Portugal, his cousin's wedding, his boat, and Mercury, until she rents a wet saw, builds the whole kitchen herself, cooks Thanksgiving in it, and when Gary finally rings the bell on a free Monday she tells him she'll call him in two weeks.

A South London sound system selector who ran the second Saturday dance for thirty years is losing his hearing from the top down and stops going, so his wife, the sweet high voice of 1988, teaches herself to sing an octave low, pulls him to the front of the church hall with his hand on the speaker, and sings into his chest while the whole room sings the high part he can't hear.

For eleven years a comic has bombed every Tuesday in a Baltimore basement with one laugh from his mother at the back, until the bartender tells him she has put forty dollars on the bar every week to buy the back row's drinks as long as they laugh, so he throws out his act, tells the room about her, and gets his first real laugh.

Two Pittsburgh goths call in for concert tickets and win second prize, four August nights at a Miami Beach resort, where they suffer through foam parties, fishnet sunburns, and a waiter who keeps telling them to smile, until a thunderstorm clears the beach and they finally dance in the rain with eyeliner down to their elbows.

Deep in the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls, a survivor finds a page from an undead child remembering a mother's candles, a saffron-dyed orange blanket, and sweetened chamomile, and having woken alone too, reads it out loud, lights every corner, and promises to come back for the child.

A by the book accountant bangs a broom on his ceiling at 2 a.m. to stop the woman upstairs from dancing, she thinks he's drumming along and dances harder, and when he finally climbs up in his bathrobe to complain, the line cook in kitchen whites calls him the drummer and pulls him in to dance.

A hospital laundry worker spends six years of nights in city college classes and at the kitchen table studying to become a surgical tech while her son tapes every bone in the body to the bathroom mirror, and when he enrolls in welding to keep her from quitting, the alphabet puts them back to back on the same graduation stage.

A man who can merge through any storm melts down trying to parallel park in front of a packed Saturday sidewalk cafe, turning attempt after attempt into a public sport, nails it on the fourteenth try, takes a bow, and watches the tow truck parallel park in one move to haul him away.

Priced out of his walk-up after twelve years, a man carries his whole life down five flights alone at one in the morning, a memory on every landing, until the grown kid from 2B he once taught to ride a bike grabs the heavy end on the last stairs.

Grandma's penciled choir folder keeps the altos honest for forty years, and when her hands shake the grandchildren take her place while the kids answer the last amen.

A year after the divorce he still shovels her walk before dawn every snowfall, and she answers with a coffee on the mailbox until the last storm of March.

Two cousins break down outside Needles with nothing but a radiator cap and a half-true map, inventing their futures while they wait for a tow.

At a dying beach shop a kid learns to wax a board from a first love, and years later the empty wax tin is still in the glove box.

A marina dockhand ties the same family's boat every summer until the kids grow up and stop coming, but he still checks the harbor cleat like they might.

At the last drive-in in the county the speaker cord is too short, so a first date has to sit close enough to share the whole movie.

A drywall man learns his daughter's curls from videos at one in the morning, and years later she calls him for the trick.

One stoplight stuck on yellow for three weeks, and a whole town learns to wave and go.