Smoke’s right eye starts to swell in the fourth, and I know he’s in trouble. This is a pretty big fight at the Taj Mahal, against Dreaded Eddie Jefferson, a California kid with machine-gun hands, and a black kid too. Smoke’s a plugger, a real old-fashioned Philly fighter, a white guy with a thick neck and thicker head.

Indigo valley is painted purple with pictures.

I say that don’t right. Mr. Kale says indigo not purple. Purple’s violet and red mixed. Blue and violet mixed—that’s Indigo. He don’t like purple in his Indigo valley. I told Bill about what Mr. Kale told me in art class. Bill didn’t care what I had to say, but Bill’s my friend.

“I’d hate to see what happened to the other guy,” the paramedic says to me. He’s on the other side of the velvet rope on the polished faux marble floor. The room is vault-cold and lit low, relaxing. It’s his way of asking. Everyone asks. Never directly, always sideways, half-joking. He shuffles forward a step. I shuffle forward a step.

I met Luigi on my second day in Elba. I had left my shoes on the veranda the night I arrived and they had been stolen, I assumed, by one of the children who pestered me for money as I had climbed the guest house stairs the night before. I didn’t recall why I left them outside, but I supposed it had been so I wouldn’t get the room so dirty that I would feel obligated to tip the housemaid.

Today, I was in a relationship. It was the happiest and saddest, the most hazy and yet abundantly clear thing that I’d ever experienced. And though I have loved and lost, I feel no regret, and have been made not a better person, but more a person, just from the experience.

“Ordinary people can never fall over the walls, because they never dare climb high enough to see what is beyond the walls.” - B. Traven

From time to time, I’d driven past those men walking down County 519. They’d been carrying clear plastic bags filled with things, not completely filled, maybe one-third, and not big like a garbage bag, but smaller. Always alone, they’d been heading toward town, wide cornfields on both sides of the road, farmhouses and silos along the way.