But then one day, the daily emails started to get weird. "I don't like it when you wear your hair up," it said. Carla looked around quickly, as though to catch the writer of the emails in the act, but of course all she saw was her fellow day traders going about their business. Slowly, hesitantly, she began to take her hair down. It was a weird message to receive, and really over the line, but she ...

Please can we go a little faster, the passenger said. Her knees were squeezed very tight together. Sometimes the body prays even if the mind doesn’t. The cab driver ignored her. Maybe he didn’t speak English? Excuse me, she said, and this time his eyes flickered to meet hers in the rearview mirror. Can we please, she said. She could taste blood in her mouth. Can we please go a little faster? Still...

Sam was, deep down, a narcissist, as he suspected everyone else was, too, and the first thing that occurred to him was that the hallucinatory sight must be, somehow, a sign for him. The universe communicates in mysterious ways, and so this was its way of telling him -- what, exactly?

He studied it: a grand piano, ornately decorated, plopped right into the middle of the beach, not too far from the...

The only sound that could be heard now was the plop and splash of her oar and the heavy sound of her breathing. “Kayak for your life” was the phrase that kept popping into her head, and Louisa wanted to laugh because it was so stupid, it was such a humiliatingly amateur thing to happen to her, a pathetic version of a high-stakes car chase, and yet here she was, kayaking for her life. Her arms bega...

As they stepped into the arena, they could hear the crowd screaming in a language they could not understand. Jim thought it was Japanese but John insisted that it was Korean. “It’s China, Vietnam, Korea,” he insisted. “That’s the order. Japan isn’t until next week.” They were so tired. Every night it was the same: bright lights, lights so bright they couldn’t see the masses producing those howls, ...