Carl W. Bosch

Redmond sat in the Quest office waiting to have his blood drawn and lamenting every minute of the wait. It was early on a Tuesday morning, and the waiting area, usually crowded and grumpy, was almost empty. Redmond sat across from a single elderly lady perusing her phone. He thought polite conversation might be the order of the day, but he just didn’t feel like it. That’s, of course, when she spoke up. “Nice day outside,” she offered. “Yes, quite nice,” Redmond responded. “I

Ten is such a reassuring number. Complete. Orderly. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A perfect ten. We count to ten to calm ourselves down. We measure decades by it. Ten feels like a number that has everything under control. Which makes me suspicious of it. Ten years is a long time. The days unfold, some slowly, some fast, and suddenly: a decade. Stories are the same way. Some come quickly. Some have to marinate for a long time. After all these years, the soup of these stories is still