
Sometimes, this city of yours is disappointing, even difficult to love. Still, you’re family now, you and Orlando. You believe in its people.

In a stretch of amber water some call the swamps of Florida, a man longs for the home he has always lived in, a long-muscled wave tossing between shores, the quarter mile of liquid he knows as if he were the watchman of its vein.


Once he mistook a prostitute for a hitchhiker, and twice he has invited genies into his truck. All three asked him the same thing: “What do you want? More than anything? I can give it to you.”