His father was a disgraced steamboat pilot with a knack for grounding boats and destroying docks, his mother the thin-lipped illegitimate daughter of a beefy prostitute. When the midwife handed him over, she waited six hours in the parlor room to be paid, her queries up the decrepit stairs returned only by the newborn’s trembling squalls...
The Princess of Pop remembered being a kid back in Louisiana on her cousins’ wide wooden swing, climbing so high that with one release of the chain links she might sail off into the clouds...
My mother found me living a new life on an island off the coast of Maine where a lighthouse on a rocky finger of land sheltered my solitude. A society designed to preserve the past had offered me refuge in exchange for being present, for walking on floors and opening doors, for filling musty rooms with my breath. I was the lighthouse caretaker...
He reeked of sweat and wine and rotting fish, and so did everyone else who sat shivering and trapped in the gristled black of the beast. The man squatted alone in his tweed rags to prod the thick shallows with a sharpened pole. He waited, silver-haired and asthmatic with his hands shaking and coralled over in splinters. He couldn't see a thing, there, in that sweating dark.
Miriam and Dorothy are just getting to be best girlfriends again. They hadn’t spoken for a while over a silly disagreement about some money Dorothy had loaned her. Then Charlie, Miriam’s second husband, got drunk and shot himself.