Could We Betray Our Parents By Going

It Was Sad And Fierce All At Once, Alive With A Lonely Purity.

I Spent Most Of My 20s With These Alligator Wrestlers In The Swamps Of South Florida.

My Older Sister Has Entire Kingdoms Inside Of Her, And Some Of Them Are Only Accessible At Certain Seasons, In Certain Kinds Of Weather. One Such Melting Occurs In Summer Rain, At Midnight, During The Vine-green Breathing Time Right Before Sleep. You Have To Ask The Right Question, Throw The Right Rope Bridge, To Get There-and Then Bolt Across The Chasm Between You, Before Your Bridge Collapses.

I'm Probably A Lot Closer Than Perhaps The Contents Of My Early Fiction Suggest To A Jaded Denny's Waitress With Smoker's-lung-black Humor Than A Ghost Hunter.

And I Do Think That Great Fiction, Even When It's Comedic, Has An Urgency Or An Inevitability To It, A Sense That The Writer Absolutely Had To Write This Particular Story In This Way.