I am complicit in the darkness

Yet it was another thing to grow to become indispensable to someone without whose infirmities the helper could not exist. People in general had started to call that helpless requiring “codependency,” but to Althea that word did no good,

I’ll bring the naproxen sodium so we won’t have any problem grabbing things.

At a good distance, he stood. Hair, gray, stringy, long as a horse’s mane. His beard, thick, unkempt. Like a caterpillar, a smile worked across his face. No, he said. It won’t be another Miami. Not another Miami.

We watched kids tweeze snapping turtles out of the park grass. They dropped them into a styrophoam cup and called it the snap turtle home. When they grow up they will bite your arms off, their father said laughing.

The dismantled moon was not cold in our hands, but warm, smooth beneath its shell as baby flesh. The musk of its damp, stringy innards filled us with sorrow.

"There's a guy and he's standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon."

But there’s a special place in my heart for Richler’s tour de force of a novel, his grand finale, Barney’s Version. It has everything — humour, a whiff of mystery, poignancy, a suggested reading list for a literary illiterate like yours truly, the Falstaf

The story of my life/ would put insomniacs to sleep.

On Friday nights I'm not there.

on the far shore, in the vineyards timed charges explode like the sun catching on fire it scares crows away from the grapes

I held on to the edge

He gathers our abusive fathers, our esophageal tears, our peanut fetuses.

So I walk behind Sandra’s desk and I put my radioactive tum-tum right up to her beaded dreadlocks and I tell her about the nuclear energy that is flowing through her right now. She laughs and screams at me the way I am sure her daughter does when someone

I arrived at Yaddo, the prestigious artists’ retreat, in the summer of 1941. With America’s “day that will live in infamy” several months away, my own day of infamy began the second morning of my residency.