How often had that hydrant even been opened? Did you jet water through a car window, what, twice at best? Summer burned just a few afternoons long, in the end. As for flying, Dose never even glanced at the sky. Flying was a summer within a summer, a whim. So why think of it at all?

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

I work on a laptop specifically so I can work in cafes and pretend I'm part of the human world.

I can't bear the silent ringing in my skull.

My inner chemistry had been hijacked by a mad scientist, who poured the fizzy, volatile contents of my heart from a test tube marked SOBER REALITY into another labeled SUNNY DELUSION, and back again, faster and faster, until the floor of my life was slick with spillage.

The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism.

It was often this way, life consisted of a series of false beginnings, bluff declarations of arrival to destinations not even glimpsed.