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The Best Nurse

 The hospital’s West Wing held a certain quiet on the night shift, a rhythmic hum of ventilators and distant pages. But for Matthew, a senior nurse with twenty-three years in those corridors, the quiet was never empty. It was filled with the unspoken—the fear in a daughter’s eyes, the confused grip of an elderly man who couldn’t remember where he was. Matthew knew his boundaries the way he knew the veins on the back of his own hands. He was studying for his nurse practitioner license, textbooks stacked neatly by his bedside at home, the material slowly cementing in his mind. He was not a doctor. He would never diagnose, never prescribe outside an order, never let the line blur in a way that compromised a patient. That line was sacred; it was safety. Yet, patients asked for him. Not just for medication or adjustments to the bed. They asked for him. “Can Matthew come in?” a wife would plead when her husband was restless after a grim prognosis. “I’d like to hear what Matthew thinks ab...
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Two Boys from Diego

 The Grounds air hung thick with frangipani and the electric hum of Intercol semi-final anticipation. On one side of the sprawling Queen's Park Oval, Marcus of Fatima College adjusted his pristine socks, his eyes instinctively scanning the rival dugout. There, he knew, was Kieron, his cousin, anchoring the defense for CIC in their blue and white. They were both from West Trinidad, grew up kicking a worn-out tennis ball on the dusty greens of Diego Martin. Now, their rivalry was the stuff of newspaper previews. "Cousins Clash for Final Berth," the headlines read. For Marcus, the game had started weeks ago, tracking Kieron's clean sheets, noting his assists, measuring his own goal tally against them. As the whistle blew, he wasn't just playing Fatima's game; he was playing against Kieron. When Kieron executed a flawless sliding tackle, Marcus felt it as a personal deficit. His energy splintered. He’d make a run, but part of his mind was watching Kieron's pos...
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Desktop World Traveler

 The decision crystallized not on a mountaintop, but in a cramped cubicle in Castries. Staring at a spreadsheet glowing with numbers that felt like someone else’s life, Mandisa’s eyes drifted to her screen saver, a photograph of the Toraille Waterfall, a curtain of silver through emerald ferns, right on her own island. A longing, sharp and sweet, pierced her. It wasn’t a call to vacation; it was a call to purpose. For years, she had treated her passion for caves and waterfalls as a delightful hobby, a thing for weekends and Pinterest boards. The world told her purpose was a straight line: school, career, ladder. But that day, at thirty, Mandisa planted her feet. She didn’t rage-quit. She simply stopped running on the prescribed path. She accepted her coordinates: a skilled, saveful woman with a profound love for the hidden, echoing places of the earth. The fear of being “unrealistic” was loud, but beneath it, a quieter voice, her intuition, was a constant hum, like distant falling ...
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Flower Petals

 The gardener found the first brown petal floating on the pond’s surface like a tiny, desolate boat. He felt the familiar pang, the urge to net it out, to tidy the perfect green circle of lily pads. For weeks, the white bloom had been the pond’s jewel, pristine and immobile against the murky water. Its fading felt like a stain on beauty itself. But the sun was high, and the work called him elsewhere. The petal sank unseen. Days later, the once-glorious flower was a slumped, skeletal husk, curled in upon its heart. It was an eyesore, a monument to loss. Yet, as he knelt to finally remove it, he stopped. There, nestled in the water where the decaying blossom lay, he saw a clutch of tiny, emerald-green pads, no larger than coins, radiating from a submerged node. They were vibrant, urgent, drinking in light the older, larger pads now shaded. They existed because the dying flower had not only released its hold, but had also, in its very dissolution, leached nutrients directly into the w...
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Marcel or Leo

 Marcel’s true life was measured in spreadsheets. By day, he was a freelance accountant, his world a silent landscape of balanced ledgers and muted color-coded cells. But at night, when the last decimal was aligned, he became Leo Vanguard. Leo was not an accountant. Leo was a speculative philosopher with a background in “urban exploration” and a knack for dissecting the mythologies of modern films. Marcel created him during a lonely, insomniac stretch two years ago with a profile with a borrowed photo, a vault of esoteric opinions, and a sharp, witty tone. On forum threads and in niche social media chats, Leo was vibrant, sought-after, and unafraid. The transformation began around 11 p.m. The glow of the screen would soften the sterile lines of his apartment. The quiet anxiety of freelance uncertainty with the unpaid invoices, and thoughts of the client who might ghost all melted away under the validation of Leo’s notifications. A well-argued point about the symbolism in a dystopia...
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Raj from Chaguanas

 The dice in Raj’s hand felt like living things, bones that knew his secrets. In Chaguanas, they said Raj could charm the spots off them, but no one trusted the charm. His smile was a well-practiced curve, his laughter a currency spent freely at rum shops and dusty pavements where men gathered to forget their wages. He won often, but it was the way he won that etched his name in the town’s mind: a little too smooth, a little too lucky, always leaving just before the mood turned. “Raj from Chaguanas? Better check your pockets after you check his eyes,” they’d mutter. The truth was, Raj trusted no one either, least of all himself. His inner voice was a constant, frantic calculation, odds, tells, escape routes. It was a voice of fear disguised as cunning. He never listened to the quieter, deeper pull beneath it, the one that whispered enough. The change came on a rain-soaked Friday at Mr. Benny’s backroom game. The air was thick with smoke and desperation. Raj was on a hot streak, the...
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The Lone Fortress

 Jinelle Chattergoon kept a perfect house. It was her fortress. Every morning at 6:17 AM, she would align the spice jars in her immaculate kitchen, each label facing forward, a silent army against the chaos of the world. The chaos, for Jinelle, was mostly other people. They were unpredictable. They made promises they didn’t keep, like her father, who had promised to come back from the store and never did. They passed judgment in quiet sighs, like her mother, for whom no achievement was ever quite enough to fill the silence at the dinner table. For thirty-something years, Jinelle had operated on one principle: it was her, alone, against the world. This wasn’t a complaint; it was a fact, as solid and polished as her granite countertops. She built her life as a monument to self-reliance. Friendships were surface-level conveniences, easily discarded if they demanded too much. Relationships were temporary negotiations. Letting anyone in meant giving them a map to the hurt, and Jinelle h...
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