BE Storybook

 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...

 The morning sun over Port-au-Prince was relentless, a white-hot hammer that drove the day's first beads of sweat from Sandley’s brow before he’d even taken a step. He stood in the doorway of the one-room cinderblock home he shared with his daughter, Lovelie, watching her sleep. She was seven, her small body curled on the thin mat in the corner, a peaceful island in the middle of his turbulent life. Sandley was a man built for work, his hands rough and strong, but for as long as he could remember, work had been a ghost. He’d had jobs, odd ones, here and there. For a few months, he’d helped a mason, hauling blocks under the same unforgiving sun. Another time, he’d found a spot helping a mechanic, his natural talent with engines almost promising something more . But the jobs always seemed to vanish, like water into the dry earth. The mason left for the Dominican Republic. The mechanic’s shop was shuttered when the owner could no longer afford the bribes the local gangs demanded . He ...