My cousin Ariel comes over after we close the restaurant to talk shit. He’s holding a V8 can full of Hennessey and smells like he just smoked a blunt. He’s wearing those aviator shades, the fake Gucci ones with the rhinestones, even though it’s past midnight.

When she thought back on her adolescent years, Min remembered her busy hands. She stood behind the family’s butchering stall, a stained apron around her waist; she pounded her cleaver down on the limp, featherless chicken before her, cutting through the skin, crushing through the bones, slicing the meat into neat, equal pieces. Chop chop chop.

My story is in the faces of those I pass along Orchard Road on Sundays, the women and men sitting in groups atop picnic mats laid out below stacks of Tupperware—adobo and pansit alongside paper plates—always looking familiar, expectant; yet those who sometimes look at me as if I don’t deserve to approach them and say, “Hello, po. Kamusta, po”—those customary greetings between acquaintances—because I am not exactly of them. Still, they are who I picture in place of the character on the blackboard: all persons—or rén.

The inauguration of the Spaceport of France was declared a holiday in Guiana, and tribes from as far as Brazil made camp along the coast to witness blastoff.  It was a rainless day in the jungle, rocket fueled and gleaming on the launchpad.  As the boys from Saint-Sébastien hopped off the school bus, commands crackled from the control center like the voice of God.

When Ghassan had come to bury his first wife in Burj el-Shamali, Ni’ma attended the burial. It was incredibly unfair, Ni’ma thought when she saw Ghassan’s wife being lowered into the ground, to escape these twisted alleyways and the bombs from every direction; to make it all the way to America, only to die anyway.