from "Starlight": Every year around the 7th of July, thousands of Philadelphia residents streamed naked into the streets to try catch a ride on a shooting star. Or at least that's what those who were affected claimed afterwards, if they talked about it at all. It was some kind of drug thing, the news said, or maybe a mass hysteria, something chemical or psychological but a public nuisance for sure. The causes were debated endlessly on CNN in the lull times between scandal, murder and politics. It sure was weird, everyone agreed in expert-speak, and someone was to blame, possibly the Japanese.

from "The Painted Girls": “The real question is if they eat people.”

“Eeeww!”

My shoulders hunched over my bowl and I slurped at my noodles to avoid talking. Not that anyone listened to me anyway. I might as well have not had a face myself for all the others noticed me.

“Demons.” Carlos continued. “Risen from Hell and paving their road back to it with their victims.”

“What do you think? Do they eat the homeless?” Rina asked. She had her hair tucked up under a blonde wig that fell in perfect ringlets. “Homeless people are always going missing.”

Carlos asked, “How many homeless people go missing in a year?”

Rina shrugged. “Dunno. Must be a lot though. How many do you think they go through in a week?”

“Ten. Twenty. Maybe more.”

“That's a lot of people to kill and eat in a week,” I said.

from "Untitled" and probably more backstory than anything.

Weeding took most of the morning, and after a lunch of fried bread, onions and eggs with salt, Irirangi and her sister had to haul enough well water to fill the tub for washing. It was late May, and while clouds blocked the worst of the piercing sun, the air sat still and moist like a stagnant pond. Sweat stuck Irirangi's cotton shirt to her chest, which had recently become sore where her tits had started coming in. Momma had opened the skylight and taken the shutters from all the windows, but even so when Irirangi ducked through the door for the buckets next to the iron stove, the cabin was damp, dark and far too hot to be tolerable. Momma sat on the porch, sewing a patch to the knee of Pop's overalls where he'd torn it the day before last against an exposed nail from a piece of broken fence.

There'd been a cut, deep enough for Momma to sew shut with strings of catgut thread, her lips pressed together tightly while Sorrell handed Pops the whiskey gourd with shaking hands. Against Pop's protests, Mom had gone to her sister Dottie for a iodine bandages and made Pop choke down her foul wheat mold tea so the wound wouldn't go bad and cost him his leg. Dad was well enough the next day to clean the chicken pens, though the roof still needed mending and there was plowing to be done in the west field.

Come harvest, they'd all be bringing the wheat in from the fields. It was a good crop this year; the amber tips of grain had a strong green aura of health, and they murmured to each other in drowsy contentment that only Irirangi could hear.