We took the sailing skiff. There was no wind. In the light of the moon, I rowed Papa upriver on the incoming tide and on past Possum Key to the eastern bays. 

The waters swept the East Coast from Maine to Florida. Hourly broadcasts informed us that land was breaking off at an alarming rate. In some places the coastline had regressed to the Appalachians

There are four hundred fifty-seven names for heroin. I have learned eighty-two of them. The drug sellers tell me the names, the pushers, the smack heads, the needle-specked little boys pulling their pants down to display their swollen red puds tell me

All along the watchtower—which he had never been on before and now that he was on it could not imagine what it was, or what it looked like, or what he looked like on the watchtower, other than the way he usually looked

I wasn’t born ugly. I’ve seen snapshots of myself as a baby, as a toddler. Beautiful little girl with springy dark curls, shining dark eyes, a happy smile.

Disclaimer: Nothing in this story is true. All of the characters in this story are products of the writer’s imagination. Any likeness of these characters and the situation described herein to those in real life are purely coincidental.

She can quote Milton Friedman from memory. She can lock her ankles behind her head.

I stepped over two weeks of May Anderson’s mail and around Charles’s vomit and into the living room and the foul air second crack at this, rolled her onto her back and found two thousand dollars. 

Xavier tells me he is upstairs doing his homework but I know that he is watching our new neighbor. Grace Poole lives in the townhouse just across a narrow alley from our own. I was taking

He had not been desperate when he answered her ad in the paper. He had already lost two other sublets- the second because the tenant felt that he had an untrustworthy face, and told him so.