FRICTION STORIES

Two people sit across from each other knowing this may be the last time.

We divided the books not by who bought them, but by who could bear the reminder of reading them first.

The fog had swallowed the breakwater by six o’clock, and with it, every reason he had given himself for staying.

Under the hum of twenty-four-hour pharmacy tubes, an apology sounds like something dropped on linoleum.

There are silences that protect you, and silences that calculate the distance between two rooms.