Joe had a sturdy mustache and a firm handshake. He didn’t say much to us at the airport, just loaded us into the back of his flatbed truck and gunned it. As he picked up speed, the wind cooled and whipped my hippy hair against my face. Fifteen minutes later, we were parked at the docks.

There was a corner of blue in Bastian’s otherwise brown eyes, a touch from his father, he told me. He was handsome, a young carpenter from Paris spending a summer in Seattle. With dark curls and a broad forehead, he had an eternal five o’clock shadow that felt like sandpaper against my palm, or according to the French, like a piece of toast – rasé avec une biscotte. Toast or sandpaper, I loved watching the creases of his face break into a boyish smile.

I want my mom. I do. I may be thirty-five years old—too old for wanting mothers—but I’m also thirty-five weeks pregnant. And I’m scared, I guess.

We are grateful to the contributions of over 500 writers and artists producing around the word of our choosing: Uprising.

I wake up with a Pangea of hives across my torso, stomach more red than white, blanching splotches tendrilling down my legs and up the inside of my arms. They went away over the weekend but are back now, pinpricked Monday night leeching into swollen Tuesday morning. I roll over, announce to my girlfriend Emily that I “definitely have leprosy,” and unpeel the covers to show her. She looks away in horror and I re-sheet myself. I don’t blame her. I’m disgusted too.

My husband and I currently have a running joke about our son Ethan’s death. Despite Ethan’s best efforts to put distance between him, a teenager who obviously knows everything, and us, his parents who are old fogies, to the point of choosing a college halfway across the country, he’s now stuck with us. Forever. My husband’s plan is for all of us to share the same urn so that Ethan will literally be stuck with us. My plan is to take his urn with us on our travels so we can take family photos at all the tourist traps. I’m currently researching how to travel internationally with an urn. You would think that there’s not a lot of articles on that, but a quick Google search came up with almost 25 million results. I can just picture it—the three of us at the Tower of London, or maybe at Kings Cross Station at platform 9-3/4. We could even use one of the photos as our Christmas card.

The night before I moved from Maryland to California by myself, I went to the ice cream shop with the color changing plastic spoons. I was fourteen. I had always been surrounded by family, having lived in a house with my grandmother, mother, grandfather, brother, and sister.

Tom had picked me up after his soccer game. He was fresh from the shower, his shaggy hair still slightly damp at the edges. He looked so beautiful. It was a Monday evening, three days after we had met. It was the first time we went on a date.

I am in a mid-sized village in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, studying abroad to learn Spanish. In the middle of my three-week stay, I want to make dinner for my host family. My host mother Doña Margo gives me two options for transforming the gallina into pollo —a sharp twist or a swift and deep slice through the neck. She looks at my hands, reads their inexperience, and tells me to use a knife. The bird is tied by its feet to a branch of the lemon tree, dazed by the rush of blood to its head. The dog knows, waits, eyes fixed on the packed earth beneath the bird.

Chen Maoping, known by her pen name Sanmao, was born in 1943 in Chongqing, China. A prolific writer and an ardent traveler, Sanmao lived in Taiwan, the Canary Islands, Central American, and Western Africa. Her life in countries abroad gave birth to over fourteen books, the most well-known of which, Stories of the Sahara, a hybrid of memoir and travelogue, catapulted her into the role of one of the most captivating and enigmatic writers at the time in the Chinese-speaking world.

In the Sonoma dusk, bats swoop above the winding road to our gate and around the garden pond below our bedroom window. I cannot see their faces; only the outline of wings and ears. The bats mostly stay away from me, in their hunt for nighttime insects that cluster in the shadows of the house.

I’m visiting my son who lives on a boat in a marina in the San Francisco Bay. The movement of the boat is almost imperceptible until I stand outside and it seems like the boat is still and it’s the dock that’s moving. I am so sleepy and although it’s 10 AM I crawl back into bed and pull the fake Sherpa cover over my head. I sob for a moment into the nubby polyester and consider sucking my thumb. I try it but get no satisfaction.

My neighbor, Willow, lights up when she sees me. Her face explodes into a wide grin, her eyes squinch up, and she ducks her chin into her roly-poly neck. She waddles over, twines her fat fingers into the wire fence, sticks her bare foot through one of the gaps, and wiggles it to say hello since her hands are otherwise occupied. She looks back to her mother, disengages one of her hands to point to a latch, and squeals gay! gay! Gate! Gate! She wants the barrier between us to dissolve.

After four days of fever, I want to unzip my skin, abandon this body too ripe with sickness and strange. I feel wind-dropped and boozy, but I force myself toward useful action. Tonight, I will cook dinner, the way a good wife and mother should. Poor inferma, my husband says, we can get take out, but I will not be deterred. Go rest, you’ll feel better. No.

My German companion and I sing as we walk. She’s into the Backstreet Boys; I go for Fats Domino.

The week before Christmas, an Italian guy from the Internet scoops you from your white house in a red car. You climb in and fold your hands over your legs, wishing they were bare so you could feel the warmth of your skin. It is cold, though people keep saying that winter here doesn’t begin until the solstice.

By giving it away. When I first learned that the line was not my lover’s—that it was, instead, a Narcotics Anonymous platitude which I might have as easily read on a proselytic tee shirt—I was, I admit, let down. When we’d first met, he claimed to be a poet: a self-conscious one, anyway, and a bad one; and it was for that reason, he’d told me, that he never shared his work. Since we’d been teenagers—me, a young fourteen; him, an old seventeen—he had been stashing his writing away as if it were its own kind of felony, as if he meant to insulate me from some further poison. Call it 2012. His Rottweiler whining at my knee. When I first read those words in his hand, in the chicken-scratched letter telling me he meant to get clean, I was all but overcome with an urge to assure him that he wasn’t dirty. When I found, rifling through his drawers after the third overdose—call it 2015—the pamphlet from which he’d excised them, an otherwise bland and featureless, anonymous phrasebook for the prodigal junkie, I kept it. Not because I saw in it anything that might help me, but because there among its occasional underscores and sparse marginalia I thought I could intuit his shadow. Not so much a ghost, nothing half-animate winking in and out of my peripheral vision, but a shadow, static. Something of him—if not original and true to his interior, a close facsimile at least—at last pinned down. I had found no papers in his desk but our rolling papers. There was no secret book of poems, no journal, no literary debris, no accumulated backlog of holiday cards, not one of my own belabored and overzealous love letters—only that thin, lonely book. Call it a relic, an artifact; call me his archaeologist. My first lover, my subcutaneous lover, my subterranean lover, my lover in the dirt—my lover to whom that book would also offer little help.

An internet meme is information ballistics. Fast, impactful, and easily weaponized, memes are often esoteric instructions directing ways to perceive and think about the world. When politicized, memes can have propagandistic power over the imagination, especially if there is a message that aligns with one’s own political beliefs.

My partner thinks I put my desk below the towel rack in my bathroom to hide from my loving parents, but that’s not the whole story. Writing fiction, to my attorney parents, financially literate sisters, and medical student partner, is a bizarre effort. They wonder what facts I work off of. Am I reading into everything they do, how they do it, and why? What does “telling the truth” mean, if mine’s the only voice on the page? My family nervously eyes my laptop and notepad. I imagine they are curious, and insecure. We’ve all been living together for three months, quarantined beneath the same butter-lettuce green rafters. Who, but them, could I be harvesting for material?

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Marx wrote that while people make history, they do so under conditions not of their choosing. In the United States, I doubt anyone hoping for change would choose today’s conditions if given the option. To name a few: an economic crisis that has left millions unemployed and unable to pay rent, a militarized police force willing to brutalize even the most peaceful protestor, and armed white supremacist vigilantes emboldened by a president whose recommended cure for a global pandemic is to inject Lysol.