BE Storybook

 Mindy’s thumb ached. It was a dull, repetitive throb that started at the knuckle and traveled up her wrist, a phantom pain she’d earned from years of scrolling. She lay on her beige sofa, the same beige sofa she’d had for five years, and stared at the glowing rectangle in her hand. On the screen, Jessica was opening a boutique. Mindy scrolled. David was announcing his engagement in Paris. Scroll. A girl she barely knew from high school was holding a hardcover book with her face on the cover. Scroll. Scroll. Scroll. Mindy locked her phone and threw it onto the cushion beside her. She looked around her apartment. The paint was a little scuffed near the baseboards but everything was okay. A single, sad succulent sat on the windowsill, half-dead. This was not the apartment of a woman opening a lush boutique. This was the apartment of a woman who still had the same entry-level graphic design job she’d gotten four years ago. A familiar, greasy feeling coated her insides. It wasn't just ...

 The ocean didn't think in days. It thought in tides. It thought in swells born from storms a thousand miles away, in the deep-water pulse that traveled uninterrupted across entire basins just to spend itself in a single moment of foam on a volcanic reef. Kai understood this. He had to. After thirty years of surfing this particular stretch of coast, the sea had become less a place and more a presence, as a vast, slow-breathing entity that tolerated his presence on its skin. He sat on his board in the lineup, the only one out at dawn. The other surfers would come later, jostling for position, chattering about the forecast and the new epoxy boards they'd bought. They were tourists in this world. Kai was a resident. The horizon was a blade of gold. Beneath him, the water was dark, almost black, holding the last of the night's cold. He let his legs dangle, feeling the pulse of the swell lift him gently, then set him down. Lift. Set. A breathing rhythm. Thrum. He felt it before ...

 The Chicago L train screeched overhead, a sound Nathan still felt in his teeth six months later. It was the sound of urgency, of a city that had no time to wait. Back home in Trinidad, the loudest morning sound was the keskidee, and time was something you had, not something that had you. Here, time was a currency Nathan was quickly running out of. He worked in the claims department of a vast insurance company, in a cubicle that smelled of recycled air and ambition. His job was to process forms, verify details, and close files. In Trinidad, he’d worked at a community health clinic. The pace was slower, woven with long conversations and the understanding that a person was more than a piece of paper. The work got done, but it breathed. Here, the work didn't breathe. It just beeped, demanding attention. His manager, a brisk woman named Carol, pulled him aside on a drizzly Thursday. "Nathan," she said, her voice kind but firm, "your output is below the team average. You...

The five of them had been friends since university, a decade of shared history crammed into takeout containers and inside jokes. There was Ethan, the pragmatic architect who planned everything down to the minute; Sam, his easy-going counterpart who saw life as a series of happy accidents; Maggie, a dynamo of ambition whose career in marketing was her primary identity; Naomi, a gentle soul and kindergarten teacher who felt everything deeply; and Jake, the cynical but loyal writer who hid his sentimentality behind a wall of sarcasm. The "Small Vacation" was Ethan's idea. A week in Martinique. "No agendas," he'd promised, which for him meant a tightly managed loose structure. They rented a villa perched on a hillside in Les Trois-Îlets, the kind of place with shuttered windows that opened to a view of the bay and the sound of distant, rhythmic waves. The first two days were a comfortable extension of their lives back home. They found a familiar rhythm: sunbathi...

 Felix had a system. He’d explained it to anyone who would listen at a party, usually while gesturing wildly with a cigarette. "The mind," he'd say, taking a long drag, "is a cage. And the ideas? They're tigers. Beautiful, terrifying tigers. You can't just open the door and let them out. You have to pace. You have to wear a path in the concrete. The smoking is the pacing. It's the physical manifestation of the creative process." It sounded good. It made him feel like a proper artist, a tortured soul in the tradition of Tennessee Williams or Eugene O’Neill. And Felix, a budding playwright, was in love with the idea of being a tortured artist far more than he was in love with the actual torture of writing. His small, HDC rent-controlled apartment was his jungle. The living room was littered with the carcasses of his process: overflowing ashtrays, empty coffee cups with brown rings staining the inside, and scattered notebooks filled not with scenes, but...

 Benjamin stood at the whiteboard in his office for twenty minutes, a dry-erase marker in his hand, and wrote nothing. The ceiling fan creaked overhead, doing little more than pushing the hot Caribbean air from one side of the room to the other. Through the louvered windows, he could see the church car park, the dusty hibiscus bushes, the dented bumper of Sister Merle's old Corolla. Home. He had been the pastor of New Hope Chapel in St. John's for twelve years. He had baptized half the children in this congregation and buried most of their grandparents. He knew these people. He loved these people. So why couldn't he make a simple decision about the new youth wing? The plans were spread across his desk. On the left, the proposal from the building committee: a functional, affordable block with concrete walls and louvred windows, just like every other building on the island. Practical. Humble. Within budget. On the right, the sketches he had been secretly making. A proper buil...