A space station custodian reflects on her terrestrial past.

"She scrubs the fingerprints from the instrument panels, watches the lights flicker and dim. She wonders how many rags she’ll go through, how many surfaces have to get clean before she can finally empty herself of the past. She doesn’t know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow. Was there a right way to take in so much sorrow it burned clean through the lungs and heart? Was there a right way to atone?"

Observations from a divided, strange world.

"But I remember him coming in the border patrol truck every morning. Like they were bringing some famous criminal. Him getting out. Every day it was like it was his first day there. The look on his face, I mean. Creepy. I shouldn’t say that. But I mean. The teasing or bullying, I never took part in all that, but I can say, I know it sounds defensive or you know like apologizing or something for the behavior, but I don’t think it was because of his coming from the other side. That was just the excuse. It was the look on his face. I mean if he didn’t want to join in, then go play in a corner. Okay. Go play by yourself. But to just sit there at the edge of the playground and watch us all like that . . . Never a smile. It sounds like a blame-the-victim sort of, that kind of unfair sort of thing. But you didn’t see his face."

A young woman seeks an appropriate way to dispose of the ashes of her father, a fervid design critic.

"He always wished to be a geometric form (so often did he rail against 'the tyranny of the organic') so I could tell myself he’d be happy, but he also hated bric-a-brac and I think right now he’d qualify, being a small object with no function."