When the others were picked up and walked home by friends or fathers or best friend__ sisters,I was the kid in a grey hoodie, walking with the poets, the singers, the thinkers, and I was not alone.

Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

Saturated Arrogance...she rebuked those about herin darkness did she dwella pathetic historyall mortal man would tell..

She could smell damprot, high, sweet, and cloying. She could smell madness like dead vegetables in a dark cellar.

He didn__ like the way things were going.There were bad omens in the wind, evil portents like bats fluttering in the dark loft of a deserted barn.

The wind swoops over the tenements on Orchard Street, where some of those starry-eyed dreams have died and yet other dreams are being born into squalor and poverty, an uphill climb. It gives a slap to the laundry stretched on lines between tenements, over dirty, broken streets where, even at this hour, hungry children scour the bins for food. The wind has existed forever. It has seen much in this country of dreams and soap ads, old horrors and bloodshed. It has played mute witness to its burning witches, and has walked along a Trail of Tears; it has seen the slave ships release their human cargo, blinking and afraid, into the ports, their only possession a grief they can never lose.