The way her shoulders sloped, you can almost see the weight of her nearly six decades of life, each turn of the clock having brought her fresh tragedy—the sudden loss of her father, the grenade-inflected dissolution of her country, the trudge of an immigrant life in America—but when she laughs, her chin rises to the sky, taking with it her unwavering spirit, her unbroken joy....

As the car door closed, he murmured, “This is getting too dangerous for the both of us.”

He gave me a sidelong glance as we both tried to ignore the thrashing in the backseat.

“If you’re snapping at them too, we might have overestimated what we can handle,” he continued in the same hushed voice.

I pressed my fingertips to my temples, a pitiable attempt to stop the throbbing. My hands were sti...

Sophie made eye contact with the bulbous frog planted in the middle of the stone path. She slowed her breathing so that her inhales and exhales matched the swell and contraction of the frog’s neck and walked toward it. The early morning mist pooled around her ankles. Sophie had forgotten to take her shoes when she snuck out of the Airbnb. The path’s stones were damp and cold against her bare feet....

The mulch was damp when Jamil stepped off the sidewalk to allow the group of teenage boys jog past him. Bits of soggy, fragrant wood chips stuck to the worn fake leather. The ticking spray of the offending sprinkler punctuated the steady stream of whooshing cars on their Monday morning commute along Verugo Avenue. As Jamil surveyed the lush lawns in LA’s valley, he wondered, as he often did walkin...