The right blinker begins to flash as the man works his way into the far lane. Slipping in between a Chrysler and an older Astro Van. He drifts onto the ramp and heads down toward the stoplight ahead. There is silence for a moment as the woman waits for the signal to change.

“One summer—the year before we married, in fact—I used to spend a lot of my free time off by myself. Not that I had much, what with working during the harvest and all of that, but I would wander out into the fields when I could. Searching, I suppose. Not with a shovel or anything, but just walking around, looking to see what I might notice. A rise in the dirt, a mound of some kind, whatever might spark a memory. But nothing. There was no trace of her, of that middle redheaded sister of mine, that I could find out there on our farm. No matter how hard I looked. And then we met and were married and life became quite wonderful for me. And so I rarely thought of her again until the moment outside that Penney’s store in Idaho. This wondrous spark of red, so many years ago now …”

The car lurches forward as a green arrow appears overhead. It darts around a slow-moving Honda and disappears into the haze of the underpass. The taillights, like the flaming eyes of a storybook monster, become smaller and smaller and smaller still. And then they are gone, swallowed up by the endless dark of an infinite night.

Spring Break

He looks at the tears in her eyes and thinks twice about proceeding. Well, not twice, really, not like in the sense that he isn’t going to go through with it—the breakup, I mean—but imagines that they can maybe wait for a moment. Get their bearings. Regroup. Then he figures, Screw it, let’s get this done, I’ve got class, and pushes on. It’s not that he doesn’t care about her, not exactly, anyway, but just that he’s in a hurry. His 1:30 tutorial is way across campus and on a good day he practically has to run to get there on time. And this is definitely not that. A good day. No way is this one going into the pantheon of very fine days that he’s set aside for himself. This is not even close.