The soda machine is humming the wrong vowel. It hums. It makes a sound so electric it hurts like accidentally biting your tongue. And it's amazing it belongs to no one. It is its own country. A few quarters and you’re not thirsty but all your quarters go in and never come out and you lose them to the other side. Which reminds me of how strange parking lots are.

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast

Morris Pete earned ten dollars an hour to wave a flag. While the other guys worked on one side of a blocked city road, he stood on the hashed yellow line, telling oncoming drivers when they could go and when they had to stop. He even had a bright orange sign that said stop, if he chose to use it. Most of the time he used the flag. It didn’t weigh as much.

Your mom spies her Thomas Kincade print, suspicious of the bubblegum pink tree – how naive she once was to sit underneath it, to follow the creek past the bend.

Your mom drives to the grocery and stays in the parking lot for seven minutes after she turns off the ignition. She lowers her head and feels a thick slow pulse in the tip of her forehead. A fly buzzes inside the car.

The green woman rides her bicycle to the store to buy milk and bread. She places the milk and bread in the basket attached to the front of the handlebars and rides home.

I.

Saturday afternoon & I am at my field, a field of colors. I tell the girls OKAY, & they sprint down the slope. The ribbons tied to their hair wave back to me & say HELLO, or GOODBYE. They are my girls for the week & they spread the field, collecting rainbow shards off the ground into baskets normally reserved for easter egg hunts. My youngest finds a rainbow stick & sucks on it like a candy cane & says to me later in the truck that rainbows taste just like pancake syrup & can she have some more before bed.

Solange Knowles, Haylie Duff, Ashlee Simpson, Ali Lohan and most of the Baldwin brothers have formed a girl gang that admitted a few boys. The lesser Baldwins are proud to call themselves members though the girls remain skeptical. The sign on the door of their clubhouse just beneath the Hollywood sign reads “No Boys or Really Famous People Allowed.”

He arrived home from school, and entered the house, into its dead feeling. The hall as usual littered with purple Post-Its that had lost their stick. The first of his mother’s notes read “EAT,” followed by a sprinkling of others darkened with arrowheads that pointed to the kitchen.

It rains all over them. Their hair and their clothes droop. Their bare feet touch the pavement. Droplets cling to their noses. They don't duck and run. These kids. Even their underwear is soaked. The place reeks. Manure and corn dogs and Tom Thumb Donuts. Wet belly buttons and Tiger Boy and diesel fuel and cows. Beer and the breath from Tiny Tina's nostrils.

A Text Derived from James Joyce’s Ulysses, 1922

A flush which made him seem younger and more engaging rose to Buck Mulligan's cheek. He flung up his hands and tramped down the stone stairs, singing out of tune with a Cockney accent: