HiddenTrack.fm

A Lisbon woman gave her brother a spare key, came home to a square of dust where the television stood, and never changed the lock, then cut and mailed him a new key every time she moved, until one Thursday in October, nine years later, he is at her door, one year clean, with her key on a string around his neck, and he knocks instead, and puts the key to his own room in her hand.

In Port-au-Prince they called him Maitre for fifteen years, but his diploma didn't cross the water, so Wilner drives a Montreal cab, until a law student reading the civil code aloud in his back seat gets one wrong, he corrects her, and he tutors her at every red light until the week she is sworn in and hands him the forms to be a lawyer again.

Sunny has the fastest mouth in Birmingham's Bull Ring market and can sell a melon to a melon, but for two years he has walked across to ask Jas from the flower stall for a coffee and turned around at the carnations, until the Saturday he sells out every crate by five, walks the whole way, gets out six slow words, and she answers faster than he has ever talked.

In a brand new red coat with her song in her earbuds, Hana struts through downtown Toronto like she's shooting a music video, with a subway grate for a wind machine, a coffee cart cup caught on the beat, and a banker doing her moves, all the way to the tower lobby, where the security guard tells her it's Saturday, so she says take two and walks it back to brunch.

A survivor fresh out of the Cinder Vault stacks five creek rocks into a Flame Altar, fights the Blacksmith over a roof and the Alchemist over a bed, loses a cellar dug past the border in half an hour, and feeds a Shroud Core to the Flame until the hill is eighty blocks wide.

Sixteen friends pack one Enshrouded server, name every chest MINE, build a tower with a door that won't latch, and wipe all sixteen on the Scavenger Matron's poison cloud while she heals back up, then win the second try and watch Marco run off with her helmet.

A professional line stander in Washington sleeps on Capitol marble and the Supreme Court steps for lobbyists at forty dollars an hour, until Election Day, when he waits three hours in the rain in the one line nobody can pay him to hold, with the same lobbyist shivering right behind him.

A daughter in Queens has interpreted for her father since she was nine, from mortgages to her own report card, until the day a doctor says a word she knows in both languages and she can't get it out, and he takes her hand and says it himself in the English he has secretly practiced for years in his produce truck.

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.

She finally takes her first solo vacation in five years, lands in Barcelona, and her bag doesn't, so while the tracker shows her suitcase touring Madrid, Ibiza, and a ferry without her, she spends the whole week in one yellow dress with nothing but her carry on and has the best trip of her life.

A deadpan nightclub bouncer works the Saturday rope against the DJ's fake cousin, a twelve person birthday, a fifty dollar bribe, and the club's own owner, who isn't on the list he wrote, lets in only his mama with a plate of oxtail, then gets put on a forty minute wait at the 4 a.m. diner.

When the Friday night power cut hits a Johannesburg apartment block, neighbors who never talk move the party to the parking lot with phone torches and a car boot speaker, and when the lights come back on at ten, the security guard whose job is keeping them on switches every one off again.

Promoted at work with nobody to celebrate her, a woman misses the last train in Shinjuku on purpose, rents a karaoke room for one, and sings until dawn, until the night clerk grabs the second mic and the salaryman next door harmonizes through the wall.

A night-shift carnival kid pockets every torn pink Ferris wheel ticket from the girl who rides alone at closing, until the last weekend of the season she leaves one blank for him.

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.

After she dies he keeps her piano bench warm every night teaching their daughter the songs she left penciled in the margins, until the girl slides him over and plays the last one alone.

When the city caps the hydrant during a heat wave, Mrs. Ortega hands a fourteen year old her nine setting hose nozzle and makes him mayor of the spray for the whole block.

Every kite season old Uncle Ferdie builds a paper kite for every child on the hill, until the year his hands shake and the children build one for him.

A city cabbie keeps the plastic meter cap flipped up for his old teacher and the neighbors who still call him by his boyhood name.