Not a true story.

Javier and I were seated on the old deck, listening to the river that felt like silence itself, when I found myself focusing on a single nail.

These weren't the dark rooms of Seattle where I'd drunk pints alone and with friends in my twenties and thirties.

You took up residence on the dark side of things, a bolthole in a wind-flayed right angle of a tower block where pigeons and suicides tumbled blackly on the air currents. You set about drifting off from who you were on a tide of cheap whisky and bad poetry, graduating…

Tabitha approached her daughter, eyes not managing to veer away in time to miss the tutu rising up the chunky ham legs.

Finally my daughter emerges from behind the silver curtain, riding piggy-back on a gigantic proboscis monkey. She's preoccupied by his nose, and wrings it like a wet dishrag with both hands. If it hurts he's not showing it.

The way she leafed through the glossy fashion magazine and asked for his opinions as though he wore stilettos himself, or see-through blouses, or crop tops, forced him to consider things about which, in the face of them, he realized he knew nothing. She was distracted…

Her mother yanked her away, like I was dangerous. I get that a lot. I’m big, you see. Tall, but it’s more than that: I’m hefty. Large. I’m a big girl, the worst kind of girl you can be.