She already spent the $100 they paid her...

I shot a dogre out of the blue sky. With its wing blown off, it swam in circles for a very long time before I rowed out and picked it out of the water. When I got back to the wharf, I cradled the little dogre in my arms. It had a black head and blacker eyes.

But one evening, after a hard day pounding grammar into the skulls of nitwits, its use came to me.

Never mind how I got it. Maybe I helped pay my way through college working part time as a museum guard. Lifted it one night from a case. Or I attended an underground auction where, for a price, such objects can be had.

I haven't been this awake in a month, I feel the renewal coming, the Rastaman says "I-and-I," I don't mean the same thing, the filled-up part turns on—never more clear how the placement of the clouds eroticized the liquid in my eyes, remember those eyes, remember those cumulous.

Looters. Anarchists. Gangbangers. Communists. Terrorists. Felons.

Standing with great authority at the head of the site, the man in black ceremoniously pushed the button, and the ornate wooden casket started on its final downward journey. Soon, only its lid could be seen. The large flower basket, mostly daisies, became ever more prominent and the stainless turning rods activated by the hidden motor which powered the lowering of the coffin, came clearly in view.

“What do you mean my gorilla motor?” Sanji asks.
“It’s what it sounds like, my motor is my gorilla.” Nan smugly replies. He twists some fuzzy pills that have formed around the waist of his khaki sweater and stirs some non dairy creamer into designer coffee. “The gorilla makes the wheels go round and I adjust the speed and steer.”

The Judge was late, which was fine except it was hot, and Bob, my client, was shackled at the ankles. A waist chain anchored Bob’s arms to his sides. Bob wore a suit, at my insistence, and he hated it. Sweat ran down his neck and under his blue collar. Perspiration dripped from his nose and ran behind his ears. Because of the shackles, he could not wipe his face. He smelled, too. None of this would help much when the jury came in. The sweat, the cheap suit, the federal defender service lawyer, the very courtroom, the shackles; each little thing would signal to each member of the jury that Bob did it. Today’s process was a formality, a nicety, not quite a sham.

When the boy was born, they said that something was wrong with his heart, but after the operation, he came out all stiff and twisted. His left leg no longer bent at the knee so that when he walked, he had to drag it behind him the way a child does a toy. And his right arm which was now rotated and pulled up at the shoulder, looked like a tangled marionette’s, and the permanently cupped hand which ought to face backward faced forward.