A woman in Charlotte has, for the past three months, been receiving a specific small handwritten note on her desk every Monday morning from a coworker she barely knows. She has not, in three months, ever mentioned them. Neither has he. The notes are approximately thirty words each. She has kept every one of them.
An editor’s note. Fifty issues in, ten weeks to the day, Margot Hale steps back to describe what she has come to notice across every story she has, over the past ten weeks, written down. It is not what she expected to notice. It is, at this point, the specific thing she wants her readers to know.
A woman in Cincinnati has, for the past three years, been exchanging two nightly knocks with an upstairs neighbor she has never met. She is not, in the strict sense, sure whether the arrangement is care, is transaction, is something else entirely, or all three. She is not sure she wants to be sure.
A woman in Sacramento has, for the past eight years, been quietly writing checks to the specific former teachers of her son on his birthday. He died at nineteen. She has never told any of them why. Fourteen teachers. Approximately $18,000 in total. Only one of them has ever cashed the check without asking a question.
A father in Albuquerque has, since his daughter was five years old, been secretly reading every book she reads — approximately 1,400 books over nineteen years. She discovered the practice in June. She has, in the two months since, been trying to understand what it means. Her father has been trying to explain.
A small independent movie theater in Muncie, Indiana has, since 2003, shown the same 90-second short film before every feature it has screened. The projectionist — a woman who has worked there for 31 years — has never explained why. The theater’s staff has, over 22 years, never asked her to stop. Approximately 47,000 patrons have seen it.
A woman in Duluth has, for the past seventeen years, been quietly maintaining her late brother’s small woodworking shop in the garage of the house she inherited from their parents. She has not, in the seventeen years, made anything in it. She has, in the past year, begun to understand what she has been doing.
A couple in Charleston has, for the past four years, written each other a single sentence at the end of every day and placed it in a small wooden box on their bedroom dresser. Neither of them has ever read the other’s sentences. They have a specific plan for when they will. That plan is why the arrangement continues.