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.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when she showed up. She was tall and dark-skinned, and called herself Cynthia. She cursed and curled her body into knots, crying out Simon’s name as though they had been lovers for years. Afterward, as she smoked in his bed, she propped herself up on one bare elbow and stared at his profile. Simon gazed at the ceiling and thought about his late wife.

There was once a man on Cherry Street who grew wings.

It was so quiet for a moment the dogs next door began to bark, furiously, as if something was the matter.

“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.

The morning before the hurricane I cheated on my husband for the third time.