“Now, because it’s his birthday and he wasn’t supposed to make it this far, he asked that we throw him a bash, like the old Augusta blowouts, and he asked that at midnight we shoot him dead.”

I stared at him. He didn’t waver.

“We figure you’re the best guy to do it,” he said, slapping a hand on my shoulder.

“I’ve never even shot a gun,” I said.

He pulled up my shirt and took the gun from the back of my pants. “It’s pretty basic. Point and pull. You’ve seen the movies.” He aimed the pistol at the portrait of the old man, said “Bang” and faked the recoil, then blew imaginary smoke from the barrel.

The fights came quickly. It took a full day after sparring to feel tip-top again—my headache would fade—but Alice never let me rest much. If she sensed I was feeling good, she’d take me out to the pond, or she’d tie bags of sand to my ankles and wrists and she’d bike with me as I ran. I was hammering the local competition, never allowing anyone past the third round, but there was still a waiting list to get into my ring. Red Heingartner was the only one to hit me hard—he had a quick hook that snapped me back—but even with Red, all I had to do was decide the fight was over, and it was over. A flurry of punches and the man went down.

That night, in the janitor’s closet of my apartment complex, beside the mop buckets and toolboxes, I kissed her, and when she kissed me back, she bit my tongue, then sucked on it, clamping down around it with her lips and yanking it with the strength of her lungs. I took her coat off, and she unzipped my pants, so I removed her sweater and unbuttoned the outermost of the three shirts she was wearing. I tried to respond to each move she made with an action I hoped she’d find interesting, original, unclichéd. When she kissed me on the eyelid, where my scar was, I put my pinkie in her navel, but she squirmed, telling me it made her feel sick.

That night my daddy came in my room and sat the edge of my bed with his back to me, his long-john shirt whitening a space in the dark. He told me that had been no man at all, but a ghost, a Confederate soldier, and I stiffened in my iron bed. Here was thick with ghosts, he told me, and told me not to be afraid, but I was, that the first one I ever saw and me maybe four years old. After he left I cried with the blanket up over my head, listening for those ghost boots slapping up the stairs.

She knows no more at that point about Jolo’s part in the recent fires than she knows why Jolo has chosen her, this last a daily source of stun. Although she does understand, a thick, thick knowledge, why she’s drawn to him. Jolo boy. With his chest ribbed like corduroy and his melted ear, his stomach and arm skin lit like glare on the river. At first it was a prickle, then a pull. Then like how hard it is to look away when the nurse’s needle enters your arm. Then, gradually, Connie learned, and, yes, it was still the skin, the rosebud ear, like a brand-new animal for Connie to handle…

You know about milksnakes, don’t ya? my grandma said.

I knew they thieved milk, sucked cows’ tits before the farmer got up in the morning. I’d seen one in our town shed, even barn-colored it was. Colored like dried cow shit walked to a powder.

Milksnakes’ll witch ye. Instermints of Satan.

A bead of red candied saliva globed up in the corner of her mouth.

As Isamina Belle confided later, when she stepped in her front door and saw her husband hanging from a rope tied to a joist, with his head bowed as if in prayer and his feet dangling inches from the floor, the first thing she did was to hasten and fling open all the windows in the house.

… at the same instant that the bolt of lightning snaked from the sky into Miss Lord’s yard and Miss Marshall’s fowl-cock spoke, the lock on the bell tower in the town square struck six o’clock and Henri the undertaker’s assistant was just about to step into the room where two coffins sat on their carriages when he stopped in the doorway thinking he coulda swear them coffins was lined up parallel next to one another when he left last night, oui? Now they head-to-head, forming a V, as if the duppies get together in the night to make jumbie conversation. 

… it brought to mind another night when Ma and I were sleeping and Pa came in, drunk as usual. For some reason he and Ma started shouting and next thing I know, PAKS! He delivered a slap to Ma’s face. Ma held her face. The house was silent. Then she uncoiled and began windmilling her hands, hitting him every which way and yelling, You come in here with your drunk self and hit me? Eh? In front of your son? That the kind of example you setting? And Pa hitting her back, but not with any force. After a while he walked back out of the house and Ma lay in bed sniffling into her pillow…

When I was a boy and I sang, my voice felt to me like a leak sprung from a small and secret star hidden somewhere in my chest and whatever there was about me that was fragile disappeared when my mouth opened and I let the voice out. We learned, we were prisons for our voices. You could want to try and make sure the door was always open. Be like a bell, Big Eric would say. But he didn’t know. We weren’t something struck to make a tone. We were strike and instrument both. If you can hold the air and shake it to make something, you learn, maybe you can make anything. Maybe you can walk out of here on this thin, thin air.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English, far away. But, okay. Be like a fox, he says. Okay. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts. But I know now. 

As I sit on the rocks and the light swings out over my head, it seems to me there is another, far lighthouse, its arms of light reaching back to this one, though I know there isn’t, the two of them reaching for each other and never quite touching as they match each other in these huge sweeps of the night’s arch. It’s a trick in the sky. The light bends, somewhere out over the bay. I come here after my visits with Freddy. Here in the ark, what I see: the light, the distance, the night. And what it shows me: that even light bends, even light is made to carry weight. And if there is a God, and he does attend to all things, if he is with even this beam of light as it heads out across the Atlantic into the night to warn distant sailors of danger, then the place he touches it is where it bends, where it disappears for a while, because that is where it needs help.

They had been watching Lena for a month. The sound technician, a barrel-chested man with whom he had not previously worked, had introduced himself simply as Bear. Bear recorded her telephone conversations, leaving him to photograph her comings and goings. In her file at the Bureau, there were many Lenas. She appeared in a slew of black-and-white pictures, bundled in a woolen coat, talking to the downstairs neighbor, inspecting potatoes and carrots at the vegetable market. On warmer days, she stretched beside the window, the sill like a barre, and he had frozen her in her contortions. When the damp wind sank its teeth until it pierced his bones, she stood at the shut window in a thick sweater sipping coffee from a shallow cup that she held in both hands. In the pictures she was usually looking out. He liked to think that she had caught sight of something she had been expecting.

N. has developed a code of conduct which requires his fierce attention. He does not fire at men in tan coats, red-haired women, or groups of three. He shoots cats for lack of better targets, but considers dogs a waste of his time and skill. And after wedging the butt of his post-lunch cigarette filter-first into the cinder-block wall by his shoulder, he might fire five shots in quick succession even if nothing moves in the space below. The red point of light should still be glowing at the end of his cigarette when he lowers the rifle. If not, he will swear softly, tap out another from the pack, and start again.

When he finally regained consciousness, they had already removed one of his legs. Before a nurse could be summoned, he looked at the hospital linen that touched the bed where his leg should have been. Lifting the sheet to look at the bandaged stump, he began to cry.

There were other amputees in the room. The man nearest the window had a bandaged face and hands. The burns that kept him whimpering through the night had also blinded him.

“Go figure,” said the man in the next bed, in one of the rare moments when they were both conscious. “They gave the bed with the view to the blind guy.”

“Fuck you,” came the response from the opposite end of the room.

My sister was enrolled in a beauty pageant for virgins, a contest I thought she could win. She was cute enough, but also, how many teenage hymens were left in America anymore? Even the emu-faced girls had been initiated by twelve. Fewer contestants fueled better odds.

- You might actually win, I told Nabisase.

- I’m glad that this surprises you, she said.

In front of me a cow was running toward a parked truck.

-Hey, I said, but the cow kept moving.

-Hey cow.

It stopped, but didn’t look at me. The truck was one hundred yards away, closer to the hills than to us. The cow was even more enormous than me.

-Keep quiet, it whispered.

There were black people and white, but I was confused by both. Being from New York, I was used to telling the difference between the two with only my sense of sound. It was just disconcerting to hear a man drawling sweetly with his wife and when I looked the guy was as likely to be blond as he was a brother. I was disoriented watching so many people act politely across the races. In New York there was no courtesy, only parallel worlds. We worked hard at ignoring each other. But down here black people and white people shook hands, greeted each other, and generally hid their mutual contempt.

WOMAN 2: The first time I saw the devil was in the desert thirty-five kilometers north of Shaarm, a multi-national army base. The devil first appeared to me in the form of a huge scorpion but it took on many forms during our brief encounter, some of them insect, some of them human, and once as a desert turkey, which I came to prefer. The roof of meaning, at any rate, was gone.

Delight was dressed as usual as a hypodermic. Her long legs in red stockings. In the aquarium in front of the glass she watched the Beluga whales. Next to her stood a man shorter than she with a red silk scarf around his neck. He swayed back and forth on his heels. The white whales turned sweetly and endlessly from back to stomach, interested only in up and down.

ANGEL/STEWARDNESS: Ladies and gentlemen, we are air-borne. I’d like to take this opportunity to welcome you once again to flight 003 to New York, and to remind you that the pilot has not as yet extinguished the seat belt or no-smoking signs. We would request that you refrain from smoking and moving about the aircraft until such time that the captain extinguishes the signs. I must request that all Muslims, genuflecting to the East on small rugs and all Jews swaying in front of any emergency exits, please try and act more like the Christians on board whom you will notice are sitting in their seats and quietly crossing themselves.