Every story here was lived by someone.

A friend’s first fossil, left for safekeeping — and then nowhere to be found after five hours of searching.

May 16, 1986: a bomb, 154 hostages, and three hours in a gasoline-filled classroom. What the children described afterward is why this story is still told.

In the slums of 19th-century Turin, a priest who worked with poor children made dangerous enemies. Local legend says he never faced them alone.

July 1973. A summer waitressing shift, a borrowed van, and a dark stretch of Route 2 at one in the morning — long before cell phones. Then a faint knock started under the hood.

My father was notorious for running out of gas — once it meant arriving at my first communion in a police car. Years later, driving home alone through a blizzard, he ran out again.

A car came out of nowhere on the drive home from after-school care. She braced for an impact that never arrived — and then her six-year-old asked, from the backseat, whether she had seen the angel.