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Celestial bodies. They knew a longevity that outshone the longest-surviving archaeological finds. The sky gave Mike a comfort: no matter where he ended up, or where the Earth ended up, the stars would still be there, and they would still be beautiful, a sort of beauty that transcended subjectivity; comets would still be plummeting towards the sun and then turning forever away in hyperbolic escape. Astronomy was, to him, learning about the stuff that lasted.

Jane had more soap than she needed, and she had a mental database of them, in her head. She collected bars of soap from fancy hotels. At the bathroom of a rest stop or a restaurant she would smell the soap, and remember the places that used the same flavor. Pina colada, watermelon, strawberry banana, lemon mint, soft lavender, chocolate, even. She liked shaking the soap from the box, tracing the outlines of the logo (Dove, or Ivory, or Dial), lathering it on as warm mist filled the shower. She hated it when soap cracked, like land in a desert.

On the battlefield, love ensued. Wasn’t that what it was? People drove sharp implements into each other and blood, the liquid of passion, spurted out, a flowering red. Soldiers bellowed, passionately, and then were silenced, by peaceful sleep. And when it was all over you could see the ravages of love, thousands of bodies littering the ground, vultures attracted to the stench welling up like a warm thermal.

Elena looked up at the crow, a stain of black against the blue sky, cawing its complaints against the chilly un-April weather. How she envied crows! To be despised by all gave you a kind of freedom; for her, if she tripped just a little bit, there would be eyes all around her, previous valedictorian and now still, somehow, clinging on to a 4.0 she suddenly didn’t care about maintaining anymore.

Why was it so hard to throw a ball in a straight line? Sheila should stay rigid for a second after the ball left her hand, and she would check that her arm extended in front of her–fingers still extended, as if holding an invisible bowling ball–was straight; her eyebrows would tensed, as if by concentration she could keep the bowl on track. But invariable it curled away, hit one or two at the edges.

Plink, plink. Josh kicked the little rocks, bouncing them against the “Danger, Stay Back” sign like a tennis player doing drills.

“Josh, come on.” His mom, camera in hand, leaned against their van, door open.

“Beeach,” Josh said, “You said we were going to the beach. Not these cliffs.” He gave a sideways soccer kick and spun and spun and a scree of rocks sailed through the little mouseholes in the fence.

I love the math majors. But I need someone who will do more than stand at a balcony and stare at the stars. I’ll be the one who does that: here, look up at all that beauty. He’ll be the one who puts his hand lightly at the back of my head: look down, Trianca. Look at all the lights in the city. He’ll take my hand and drag me down the stairs and say, “It’s called nightlife, Trianca.” I’ll say no but he won’t listen, and I’ll be glad he didn’t listen. Some things, you have to be forced to do.

Raising their fingertips against the bark. Aspiring to be more, destroying at the same time. I looked at the drawing, red melting into orange into yellow into sparks, an advance guard.

Even with the Fist on, he announced his presence by knocking. He swung his hand back, smiled, flexed his fingers, and delivered the traditional notice of visitation. Except of course, when his knuckles touched, the door splintered like glass from a bullet. His victim, upon hearing the sound, as if he knew he would be doomed, didn’t turn from his laptop screen. Just a faintest twitch of the lower thigh muscles, a finger frozen in a mouse click.

Eep! she would say when she walked in the bathroom door as someone else was just on her way out. When John closed the window in calculus class by releasing the latch and letting it free-fall, her hands flew towards her ear before the bang, shielding it from imagined shrapnel. Sam, who threw snowballs at everyone, didn’t throw snowballs at her.

She revealed during get-to-know-each-other bingo: she’d never broken a bone. Alice, she writes, and now you have four-in-a-row. A fragile name, like an icicle at the top of your window: beautiful, translucent, unpreservable: once fallen, will shatter.

She had a twenty-pound backpack (deep blue), it would topple her chair when hung incorrectly. It was big on her small frame, and seemed to pull back as she bounded upstairs recklessly (after every class, it seems she has another one). You worried, but you never said anything.