What have I eaten? Lies and smiles.

Secretly, in studies and attics and schoolrooms all over America, people must be writing.

The trouble about jumping was that if you didn't pick the right number of stories, you might still be alive when you hit bottom.

Don't let the wicked city get you down.

Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.

If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad.

I felt the mask crumple, the great poisonous store of corrosive ashes begin to spew out of my mouth.