Worse than the noise was how every addiction was sold curbside. You didn’t even need to leave your car. You didn’t even have to park.

He’d been around enough bullies to know that rage and pain needed to vent,

this is the opposite of a slave auction.

First, every animal wears a badge. This might be a bracelet braided by their kid or a neck tattoo, but it’s a hint about something secret they treasure. If you identify the badge and praise it—open sesame—you pick the lock on someone’s heart.

Loving an animal, a horse, cat, or dog, was always a romantic tragedy. It meant loving something that would die before you.

The memory was like bronzed baby shoes or the wad of cotton folks used to find in a bottle of aspirin: almost forgotten.

Now he knew doctors were just like every other working stiff.

She worried that with a new baby the situation wouldn’t get much better. You might be able to divide a man’s love in half, but not in three ways.

Quickly was he among the haunts and low places, rubbing elbows with such denizens who did not exist in the comfort of daylight and human industry. Mishaps and history had condemned them, these crippled minds and mangled bodies,