Carrie’s mom died at age thirty-six. Her dad when he was thirty-eight. Six to eight years. A red semi blared its horn when Carrie corrected the brief swerve out of her lane. While the semi passed, drenching her windshield in a wake of dirty water, the wipers thumped across the window like a metronome in double time. Or perhaps that was her heart. She gripped the wheel until her slim knuckles resembled vellum stretched over bone. Today was Carrie’s thirtieth birthday. She stole a glance at Jeremy, her oblivious husband, currently muttering the contents of his cue cards in the passenger seat. He was defending his dissertation today, and she wished that was the reason he hadn’t acknowledged her birthday, but it wasn’t. Valentine’s Day had been overlooked too. The fog forming on the inside of the Toyota’s windows didn’t clear with heat or cold, or her harried swipes. Everything but inaction made it worse. It condensed on her neck, in her lungs. She turned off Forbes Avenue and into Pitt’s dreary campus. Jeremy had …

Papa makes peppers and onions. He lets them get brown and slimy before he puts me in. The oil boils me up before I can feel it—not that I can feel it—I can’t feel where I begin and where the peppers and onions end. Papa pulls a wet sniff in through his nostrils like jumbo jet engines with black hairs bushing out. I smell so good, Papa says, I smell so good there in the pan. Papa breaks me up with the wooden paddle. He uses it to swat the fat flies away from my good smell. I leak my juices into the peppers and onions, and everything in the pan is wet. When they took me away, did the wet creep down Papa’s nostrils like jumbo jet engines, and get caught in the black hairs that bush out? Did the wet roll down his spidery red-veined cheeks? After they took Brother last week, I heard Papa in the house, tearing in two. It did not rain that night. Just a cold damp. I laid …

The early morning silence in the gas station is unbearable. It makes even the low hum of the fridge against the back wall feel like a jackhammer on my ears. My eyes glaze over cans of coffee in black and white and every imaginable shade of brown, searching for something to get me through the next ten hours. An unsweetened black cold brew should do the trick. I open the frosty glass door and reach toward the back of the fridge to get the coldest one. Only then do I catch a glimpse of something bright pink screaming for my attention behind the cans. Curious, I push them aside and pull out a bubblegum-colored milk carton. On the front is a drawing of a smiling cat with a milk mustache. It’s a carton of Miyabi Strawberry Milk. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of these at a store. Not since I was a kid, I think. Has it really been that long? I turn the carton over, looking for the expiration date. …