There are grape leaves, like a crown, on her head. Grapes hang in her hair, and in her hands she holds the green vines. She dances with both arms in the air. On her smallest toe she wears a ring of pink shell.

Monica calls. There is a confessional tone to her voice and I don’t want to hear the confession, the voice, anything. I’m already hungover from the upheavals of the preceding day plus I have a headache from

It seems peculiar to me that it should all have begun with winter, as if some great, simple logic were implied, but so it did begin, with no more meaning then than I know now.

Perhaps I shouldn’t count the death of Kobi, the sea otter, whom I loved and who was killed at the end of the book by a hunter 

I’ve always had a problem with introductions. To me, they don’t matter. It’s either you know me or you don’t—you get? If you don’t, the main thing you need to know is that I am a hustler through and through. I’m that guy that gets shit done. Simple. Kick me out of the house at fifteen—a barged-in-on secret behind me, a heartbreak falling into my shin as I walk—and watch me grow some real useful muscles. Watch me learn how to play all the necessary games, good and ungood; watch me learn how to notice red eyes, how to figure out when to squat and bite the road’s shoulder with all my might. Watch me learn why a good knife (and not just any type of good, but the moral-less kind, the fatherlike kind) is necessary when you’re sleeping under a bridge. Just a week after that, watch me swear on my own destiny and insist to the God who made me that I’m bigger than that lesson now; then watch my ori align.

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. 

When the new shopkeeper arrived in the village he aroused great curiosity along with some scorn. He was deemed refined because his fingernails looked as if they had been varnished a tinted ivory. He had a horse, or as my father was quick to point out, a glorified pony, which he had brought from the Midlands, where he had previously worked.