HiddenTrack.fm

One punch at sixteen killed his best friend, he never threw another, people call him soft, and he keeps his hands in his pockets because still water is not empty water.

A track starter who jumped the gun once and ended a scholarship in lane three starts every meet since with his thumb as a prayer, gun down, track empty.

A prison kitchen cook has made thirty one last meals without ever asking what the men did, cooks number twenty seven the birthday cake he never had, and when slip thirty two comes he hangs up his apron and lets the state eat alone.

A deadpan narrator walks through a crime boss's funeral naming all six pallbearers and what each one stole, the letters handed out at the grave expose every one of them, and the casket turns out to be full of river sand because the man in the gray hat telling the story is Ray himself.

A father sits in his car outside the venue while his grown son tells the crowd about the fist hole in the hallway wall, every defense he starts ends with admitting the boy is right, and he drives off with the drawings he kept in the glovebox and lets his son have the night.

Twelve hour forklift shifts, open mics for three people, forty seven views and a pink eviction notice with sixteen bars on the back, so he learns to keep his own score, until one Tuesday a kid in the front row mouths every word and that is all the crowd he needs.

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.

For twenty years two best friends have walked from opposite ends of the Lake Street bridge every Sunday at seven and met above the middle of the Mississippi, where Minneapolis turns into Saint Paul, until the winter one of them stops coming, and the other walks the whole bridge and two more miles to sit on her step and talk to her door every Sunday until March.

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.

Six minutes in the Shroud and one more chest too many, so a looter dies with a full bag at zero, wakes at the Flame Altar in rags, crafts a wand from two Bones, and sprints back through the fog for his tombstone, only to spot another chest on the way out.

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 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 year sober, a man becomes the permanent Friday night driver for his old drinking crew, carries them home one by one across Houston and waits for every hall light to come on, until the night of his one year coin, when all three show up stone cold sober and put him in the back seat.

For two years she has ridden the night train from Paris to Vienna once a month to see him, saving every return ticket in a shoebox, until the ride where she carries a one way ticket and a second suitcase.

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.

After the funeral a granddaughter oils her grandmother's Singer the same two-drop ritual before every hem, then uses it to finish the wedding dress the old woman started and never got to see.

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.

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.

Twenty years after he skipped his best friend's mother's funeral, a man home for Thanksgiving turns on his childhood walkie-talkie as a joke, and a small voice answers on channel three.

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.

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 laid-off mill worker still wears his union pin to the Friday bar that used to be packed with the crew, and orders two beers out of habit.

He borrows a black tie for a friend's funeral he cannot afford to dress for, and spends the service counting every kindness he still owes.

A granddaughter finds grandpa's tackle box still packed with lures after he stopped going to the lake, and she cannot bring herself to throw it out.

A sister keeps resetting the porch light timer every night for a brother who has been saying he will visit next month for three years.

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

A grandson quizzes his grandmother for her citizenship test with her late husband's flashcards.

A long-haul trucker keeps leaving voicemails for the grown daughter who stopped answering, until her greeting changes.

Year one of recovery: a sponsor leaves the same dented thermos on the back table every Tuesday, never explained.

A son clears his late father's garage and finds the note taped under the bench.