HiddenTrack.fm

Every Tuesday for eight months a man visits his best friend in a coma, plays their old beats, shaves him Sundays and tells him every score, while a soul singer promises the chair is still his.

On his mother's last day after twenty-two years driving the Number 9 city bus, a son rides her whole route in a suit while every regular she ever carried gets on, and then he drives her home.

An old head comes home after twelve years to a block that changed every lock, and without one threat makes it clear he was gone but never left.

At his graduation an eighteen-year-old sees the father who left him sitting front row with a camera, and spends three minutes telling him whose seat that really is.

A nineteen-year-old and his crew get twenty-two minutes in the train yard to paint his late brother's name across one whole subway car before the morning run.

The river a town straightened and built on raps in a woman's voice, tells everyone on Monday exactly when she's coming back, and arrives Thursday at two a.m.

A man on house arrest who won't talk watches a gray car park outside every night, then turns his own ankle monitor into the alarm that saves his life.

An old lifer who runs the prison choir covers two years of tunnel digging with hymns, then holds the last note at the Visiting Day concert while three young men crawl out.

For twelve years an old barber has shaved the man behind his son's death every Thursday with a straight razor at his throat, and this week the man falls asleep in the chair.

A night-shift air traffic controller talks a seventeen-year-old student pilot down to the runway after his instructor dad passes out in the seat beside him.

All summer the old king on the next roof steals a Brooklyn kid's pigeons and sells them back at twenty a head, until the kid learns his whistle.

Her first night alone in a Melbourne flat after six years of saying sorry, she sings out loud, until a knock at eleven.

A bail recovery agent has seventy-two hours to bring in his own little brother before their mother loses the house she put up for his bond.

A sixteen-year-old girl on the boys' wrestling team is done winning by forfeit, and at state the coach's son who ducked her finally steps on the mat.

A deputy sent to evacuate the seventy-nine-year-old woman who raised him finds out she won't leave her husband's grave in a hurricane, so he stays too.

A street racer with a suspended license runs a donor heart through the fog and finds out at the gas stop that it is for the judge who took his license.

A store owner who robbed the same counter at nineteen hits No Sale for a scared kid in a ski mask, opens the drawer, and offers him the apron.

A tent-revival con man preaches a dying mill town out of its last dollars while Sister June, the choir soloist who sings his hook, quietly does the math.

A seventy-four-year-old pool player with a shaking hand banks the eight off three rails on the cocky son of a man he beat years ago.

A finder tracks the witness who put his crew away to a small-town bakery, and her verse reveals she has been watching him since he hit the county line.

A kid who learned balance on the rail line walks a cable between two grain towers at sunrise while the town that told him to sit down looks up.

A line worker who stutters at the drive-thru gets handed the bullhorn and twelve hundred people, and a woman from the line sings the hook with the whole gate.

A sneering heir toasts at the gala while the gardener's boy who did his time pours the lemonade, and nobody ever comes for him.

A cutman tells his fighter to stay down in the ninth to save the eye, the rematch pays, the friendship does not, and the choir keeps counting what love cost in the corner.

One punch at sixteen killed his best friend, he never threw another, people call him soft, and he keeps his hands in his pockets because still water is not empty water.

A night switchman finds a warm sealed car off the manifest, the boss says scrap it sealed, and he sends it to the camera yard instead, then walks the tracks home.

A track starter who jumped the gun once and ended a scholarship in lane three starts every meet since with his thumb as a prayer, gun down, track empty.

A hotshot superintendent's crew gets cut off when the wind turns on a burning ridge, so he lights the ground they stand on to give the fire nothing to eat, lays twenty bodies down in the black, and walks all twenty out.

A crab boat deck boss with a rebuilt hand works his last season through forty foot seas, and when the greenhorn goes over the rail he goes in after him on a rope and hauls him back like the heaviest pot of his life, then hands the kid the boat.

A prison kitchen cook has made thirty one last meals without ever asking what the men did, cooks number twenty seven the birthday cake he never had, and when slip thirty two comes he hangs up his apron and lets the state eat alone.

A bank job told second by second on the vault clock, until a silent alarm blinks, the radio goes dead, and Deacon goes down on the tile, and the last man standing walks through the rain to the getaway van where Lou and Marisol sit waiting, because they taught him how to count, so now they count with him.

A getaway driver with three rules, never cut the engine, never learn a name, never look in the back seat, breaks the third one and sees his sister's sixteen year old son, ditches the crew and the duffel, puts the kid on a 4 a.m. bus with every dollar he has, and for the first time in twelve years cuts the engine and lets them come.

A gravel voiced detective stacks the evidence on two bodies at the pier and the suspect answers with two words, until he flips the room and reveals he filmed the detective's partner doing the shooting from a roof across the water, three copies with three lawyers, and the detective quietly asks to turn the tape off.

The city itself narrates 3:15 a.m., the manhole steam, the bodega cat, the names on the bridge rail, then turns its streetlights, dogs, sparks and sirens on a man stalking a woman on the fourth floor, and by sunrise everyone thinks the night was calm.

He did five years for the crew and nobody visited, so he learned debt in the prison library, worked days and took accounting at night, quietly bought the note on his old friend's club through an LLC, and walks in Friday to drop the keys on the counter and turn the lights off.

For twenty years two best friends have walked from opposite ends of the Lake Street bridge every Sunday at seven and met above the middle of the Mississippi, where Minneapolis turns into Saint Paul, until the winter one of them stops coming, and the other walks the whole bridge and two more miles to sit on her step and talk to her door every Sunday until March.

A survivor fresh out of the Cinder Vault stacks five creek rocks into a Flame Altar, fights the Blacksmith over a roof and the Alchemist over a bed, loses a cellar dug past the border in half an hour, and feeds a Shroud Core to the Flame until the hill is eighty blocks wide.

A Flameborn climbs from the Cinder Vault through the Matron, the Thunderbrute, and the Albaneve dragon to Vorgoth at Mother Flame's Domicile, feeding the Flame eleven times until every altar finally pushes the fog back off the land.

Deep in the Kindlewastes Hollow Halls, a survivor finds a page from an undead child remembering a mother's candles, a saffron-dyed orange blanket, and sweetened chamomile, and having woken alone too, reads it out loud, lights every corner, and promises to come back for the child.

A hotel inspector who has slept in two thousand beds under a different false name in every city gets found out in Istanbul by an old bellman who did her job for thirty years and quit to be known somewhere, so she lets her next assignment ring out, checks back in under her real name, and stays one more night.

A daughter in Queens has interpreted for her father since she was nine, from mortgages to her own report card, until the day a doctor says a word she knows in both languages and she can't get it out, and he takes her hand and says it himself in the English he has secretly practiced for years in his produce truck.

Dee runs Germantown from a folding chair on Chelten Avenue with a thermos and a flip phone, knows a guy for every busted pipe, prom tux, pothole ribbon, and third floor piano, and never takes a dime, until the bakery owner he has called for twenty years tells him she knows a guy who needs a Friday dinner date: him.

The front left wheel gunner on a racing pit crew, the man nobody can name, does a hundred practice stops a day for two seconds of work, then nails a two point oh stop in the title deciding race, and the champion walks the trophy down the pit lane and puts it in his gloves.

A late night radio host who has never once let the station go silent plays the same request every night at 3:10 for a cab driver and his baker wife, until the calls stop and the wife phones in herself, and for Ray the host finally leaves five seconds of dead air.

Every other Sunday a boy brings a roll of quarters to the prison vending machine, until the day he picks his father up for good.