PROSE

Walt Haugen

Count the three bills. Then spend the rest.

Walt Haugen

Most buyers buy a job. Do the sum first.

Arvid Holmqvist

Some ties must be cut. Most are worth keeping.

Wes Holloway

You can change the room. You still walk in.

Marco Delgado

Your body was running before the manual arrived.

Theresia Kranawetter

What would you sacrifice to know the future?

Ray Colter

You were told to keep your options open.

Malcolm Reeve

You have watched it your whole working life: the careful one passed over, the confident one raised, the wrong person handed the job while everyone quietly agrees not to notice.

Wes Holloway

You break every promise you make to yourself.

Marco Delgado

You are tired in a way sleep doesn’t fix.

Ray Colter

You already do half of an accident investigator’s job on yourself.

Anders Veehl

Rome once heard a voice at the wall — bodiless, calm — warning of the army on its way.

Hilde Verbeke

You were taught to start.

Edmund H. Pryce

You wake each morning with twenty-four hours in your pocket — the same sum handed to the billionaire and the clerk, free, before you have earned a thing.

Cormac Hennessy

For thirty-one years Cormac Hennessy cleared the houses of the dead in the west of Ireland, and learned to read a life by its drawers — who died clear, who died owing, and the difference it made to everyone left behind.