At the ripe age of 21, Ariel lives in failure of that first step. She’s filing papers now, an administrative assistant at the Dropbox headquarters in the heart of Silicon Valley. She watches the computer engineers check in and out behind the front desk on the third floor, and all day this plagues her with a sense of inadequacy. She thinks about her upbringing in an upper-middle class

The Magic Spot: A story inspired by Giorgio de Chirico’s “The Melancholy of a Beautiful Day” He lay in the grassy median of a road which bounded one side of a large inner-city university.  How he had come there, nobody knew.  From his looks, though, his path had been a cruel one. His body showed the signs of a life wracked by insupportable pain.  His face was hollow and sallow, 

he fortune teller pushed the cloth curtains out of her way and stepped into the room, adjusting the oversized turban on her head.