Summer love Stories

1986 is a year that lingers in the memory. In January, just 73 seconds after launch, the space shuttle Challenger disintegrated. Three months later, in the little-known town of Chernobyl, reactor number four exploded, creating fear and alarm across Europe and beyond. They were both devastating events, but the reason why I will never forget that year is because it was the summer we went to the Alps. It was the year I met G...

Francis leaned back, listening to the shuffle of tourists and the clack of chess pieces echo through Washington Square Park. The summer heat hung over lower Manhattan like a weight. It roasted skin, soaked shirts, and slowed everything to a crawl. He sat on one side of a stone chess table, with sunglasses shielding his eyes and a Mets cap keeping the sun off his face. He looked at his opponent, then down at the board. Fra...

I didn’t come to the beach to fall in love. I came because I was bored, burnt out, and vaguely dramatic about turning thirty. I’d quit my job three days earlier by replying “No” to an e-mail that said “Please confirm availability for Q3 onboarding.” I packed a backpack, found a cheap rental by the sea, and brought the three things I trust: my camera, my skateboard and my grandmother’s dented thermos. The first time I saw...

He showed up on a Monday, carrying a skateboard, a chipped thermos and a camera with no strap. Then, very seriously – as though we weren’t already standing on a sandpit of seagulls – he asked, “Where’s the beach?” I pointed over my shoulder at the waves shuffling up and down the shore like an indecisive waiter. “Just past the seaweed. If you reach your childhood memories, you’ve gone too far.” He blinked. “That’s oddly po...

Heron, as I’d grown used to calling him, folded eight paper cranes as a eulogy to his former self, every day before he did anything else. He’d been doing this for months, preparing for the first of a series of surgeries that would make him more himself. We lived in Cove Town, in those early years, back when I still liked to be called Reeds, just my natal surname but it was better than the given name that I had long since...

Mia pressed her forehead to the car window, watching the city’s grey dissolve into the open sky. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d laughed, really laughed. Life had become a series of muted days: work, sleep, repeat. Even her friends’ voices had grown distant, muffled by exhaustion. She hoped the sea might remember who she used to be. Her phone buzzed with work emails and missed calls as she pulled up the sandy la...