Author name: Jenny Ng

Part 1: The Taillight That Ended My Career I was ordered to tow his bike and call it a night. Instead, I bought gas, taped a paper star, and broke protocol. Rain needles the windshield hard enough to blur the streetlights into smeared halos. It’s 11:57 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and my radio is a metronome […]

Part 1 – The Key on the Casket “Tell the ushers to stop him at the gate if he shows up in that leather jacket,” I told the church coordinator, tapping the glossy guest list with my polished nail. “This is my father’s funeral, not a parade.” My name is Nora Hale. I argue for

The sanctuary doors slammed wide in the middle of the hymn, and two dozen men in scuffed leather came down the aisle in a tight, silent line—one of them carrying a child-sized helmet plastered with rainbow stickers. Mothers pulled little ones close. A dad stepped sideways, shoulder first, to make himself a wall. The choir

Part 1 — The Oil-Slick Photograph The first crash wasn’t a punch—it was the clatter of an aluminum walker snapping backward on concrete, followed by a small white square spinning through a rainbow sheen of spilled gas. The phone kept recording. The whole parking lot held its breath. I was in the back room of

Part 1 — When the Engines Surrounded the School Thirty-one engines rolled like thunder around Maple Ridge Elementary and the windows on my second-grade classroom trembled in their frames. Lights off. Blinds half-drawn. Twenty-three little chests holding their breath. My phone lit my palm with six words from an unknown number that used to be

Part 1 – Boots at 3 A.M., Oxygen Hissing At 2:59 a.m., boots crossed my hallway, my father’s oxygen hissed, and four helmets turned toward the baby monitor I use to check if he’s still breathing. I grabbed the baseball bat from behind my bedroom door and moved toward the living room, heart punching at

I hit upload on the video exposing my own dad—then watched a squad car roll up and the officer salute him like a flag. I’m sixteen. Our street is a quiet cul-de-sac where people complain about lawn heights and Halloween inflatables on the Nextdoor app. My dad’s motorcycle does not belong here, at least not

Part 1 — Don’t Kill the Engine The kid slammed his palm against my gas tank in 105° heat and whispered through a plastic tube, “If you rev it right now, my grandpa might live ten more minutes.” I’d pulled off at a Chevron outside Riverside Bend because my knee was barking and my tank

PART 1 — The Night the Engines Drowned Out the Alarms Sixty engines roared beneath the window as I pinched the sedation line and pulled it from Mr. Carter’s IV—right when the nursing home’s fall-risk alarms began shrieking like a fire drill. On my screen, the dashboard flashed the same soft blue lie it always

At 7:00 a.m. sharp, the old biker slammed his grease-black knuckles against the dead factory’s time clock—and thirty seconds later the bulldozer screamed as the ground spit out lunch pails. I was there for content. That’s the rotten truth. I’d filmed him before—the town legend everyone called Ghost, real name Caleb Harrigan—rolling up on a