Author name: Jenny Ng

Part 1 — The Birthday Tapes At 2:03 p.m. in a hospice room that smelled like lemon wipes and winter air, a biker set a cassette player on my mother’s blanket—then a man’s voice I had never heard in my life said, “Happy thirty-fourth birthday, June.” I pressed the call button so hard my thumb […]

Part 1 — The Night the Lights Went Out My father did not show up to walk me down the aisle.Ten minutes later, the whole town watched him on a shaky livestream, standing in the middle of a dead intersection, arms spread wide, guiding an ambulance through a river of stalled cars in the blackout.

Part 1 — The Bead in the Sunlight Caleb saw it before he knew what he was seeing—a tiny flash on hot stone, a turquoise bead catching nine a.m. sun. Five search flights had skimmed this canyon. Dozens of trucks had rolled past. But at twenty-five miles an hour, the old eyes of a biker

At 4:12 a.m., something scraped inside a plastic bin beneath the overpass and made the kind of sound that slices through a helmet, through a chest, through sleep itself. I had pulled off because my front brake started singing a high, metallic whine. Rain ticked on the concrete. Traffic thundered above like a far-off storm.

Part 1 — Dawn Checkout I shoved Grandma Jo’s wheelchair through the laundry door while the transfer van idled at the curb and an email flashed on my phone: her move got bumped to this morning. Eight minutes. Two blinks from her good eye. Yes. They call it “transition.” I am thirteen and I have

Part 1 — The Note on the Hot Hood She set the paper on my scorching hood like it might burn a hole through both of us. Ink bled where sweat and tears had fallen. In a voice barely bigger than a whisper she said, “If you look scary, could you please use it for

The little girl pressed her palm to my idling engine, felt its voice, then signed one word: HOME? People say engines have a sound. Mine has a heartbeat. The Indian Scout I call Bluebird sat there purring in the Sunday heat, paint the color of a lake before dawn. I cut the throttle so the

Part 1 — Spin Cycle Three patrol cars slid to the curb outside Suds City, light bars cold and silent. Inside, a tattooed giant cradled a wooden box of quarters while a small deaf boy signed, Don’t go. The fluorescent lights hummed. Dryers coughed warm air that smelled like bleach and old raincoats. Phones came

Part 1 – Are You Cuffing the Flowers? A machine screamed thief. A widowed biker buying lilies for his late wife froze—until a tiny voice in a polka-dot raincoat asked, “Are you arresting the flowers?” Rain came down like silver threads, stitching the parking lot to the gray afternoon. Ray “Ghost” Delgado stood under the

Part 1 – The Jar of Pennies 1:03 a.m. The shop was dark, the street was empty, and a glass jar slid under my garage door like a message in a bottle from a kid who didn’t have anywhere else to send it. It rolled until it kissed my boot. Inside: copper and nickels and