The Washing of Days
The laundromat glowed like a fish tank in the dark street, its fluorescent lights harsh against the fog that rolled up from the bay...
Thomas Riverside is a writer whose works are filled with romantic longing, the search for meaning, and bittersweet human connections. His characters seek love and understanding in a world full of loss and change. Riverside has a gift for showing the fragility of human emotions while giving them eternal significance.
Stories by this author (25)
The Weight of Water
The letter came during the dinner rush, which was like God's own joke, Miguel thought, because when did anything important ever come when a man had time to think...
The Weight of Leaving
The corner store squatted between a boarded-up print shop and a Dominican hair salon, its yellow awning faded to the color of old newspapers...
The Weight of Silver
The plane descended through clouds thick as wool, and Amina Hassan pressed her face to the window, watching the Aleutian Islands emerge like broken teeth from the Bering Sea...
The Weight of Smoke
The smoke came first, before the evacuation order, before the sirens, before everything went to hell...
The Weight of Breathing Things
The dog's breathing came in short gasps, each one lifting the taut dome of her belly. Esperanza Reyes ran her hand along the golden retriever's distended side, feeling for the positions of the pups that wouldn't come...
The Last Wash
The fluorescent tubes hummed their familiar broken song above the rows of washing machines, half of them tagged with OUT OF ORDER signs that had yellowed like old teeth...
The Space Between Storms
The rain had been falling for three days straight, that particular February rain that San Francisco saves for when the tourists have gone home and the city can be itself again—cold, unforgiving, and honest...
The Weight of Water
The heat hit Marcus Chen like a physical wall when he stepped out of his Tesla at the farm's gate. It was the kind of heat that made the valley shimmer, that turned the air thick as cotton...
The Night Shift
The fluorescent lights hummed their familiar tune as Teodoro Reyes pushed his cart down the seventh-floor corridor of Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Three-fourteen in the morning...
The Weight of Rain
The morning rain fell on Portland like it had business there, steady and without apology. Mai Nguyen stood in the narrow corridor of her food truck, hands working the knife through cilantro while her mind worked through numbers that wouldn't balance...
The Weight of Strawberries
The fog came in from the Pacific before dawn, rolling over the Salinas Valley like a slow gray tide, and María Esperanza was already bent among the strawberry rows when the first light touched its surface...
The Weight of Mountains
The morning came to Whitefish the way it always did in September, with frost on the windshields and steam rising from the coffee cups at the Studebaker Diner...
The Weight of Water
The industrial washer had been making that sound for three days now—a grinding, metallic complaint that reminded Sachiko of her husband's labored breathing in those final weeks...
The Weight of Water
The Pacific was wrong that morning. Dr. Amara Okafor knew it in her bones before the instruments confirmed it, the way her grandmother in Houston used to know rain was coming by the ache in her knees...
The Night Shift
The truck's generator hummed like a tired heart, steady but labored, as Mai Nguyen arranged the last of the pickled carrots in their steel container...
The Paper Birds of Tuesday
The Tuesday woman always waited at the same corner of International Boulevard, under the awning of the Lucky Star Pharmacy with its faded red cross and Vietnamese letters Marcus couldn't read...
The Weight of Water
The morning Jim Harrow found the dead heifer by Willow Creek, the sun had already burned the dew off the grass before six o'clock...
The Weight of Keeping
The fluorescent lights hummed their familiar dirge while Omar Habibi counted cans of green beans that nobody would buy. Twenty-seven. Same as last week, same as the week before...
The Midnight Kitchen
The water was always too hot at Murphy's Diner. It had to be, Murphy said, hot enough to kill whatever grew in the dark spaces of a forty-year-old kitchen...
The Spinning Cycle
The boy was sleeping between the dryers when Michiko found him, curled like a question mark against the warm metal. She stood there with her ring of keys catching the fluorescent light, watching his chest rise and fall...
The Night Shift
The offices of Apex Technologies went quiet at six-thirty, like a heart stopping between beats...
The Ocean Between Us
The first time Michiko Tanaka found the Syrian boy sleeping in her laundromat, it was February, and San Francisco was having one of those damp, bone-deep cold spells that made even natives question why they paid so much to live there...
The Butcher's Daughter
The morning Maria Russo came home to Millfield, the air hung thick with the smell of rendered fat and old dreams...
The Weight of Oranges
The morning light came through the store windows the way it always did, catching the dust motes that danced above the pyramids of oranges Duc Nguyen had stacked before dawn...