I sat up and rubbed my eyes. “He’s just a kid, Toby. There’s still hope.”

“There’s no hope for that fucking kid,” Toby said and ripped a line up his left nostril. 

The death toll is estimated to be more than 530 million in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, New Guinea, the northern and western territories of Australia, and areas of southern China, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Millions of environmental refugees are flooding China, Myanmar, Burma, Eastern Europe, India and the Middle East. Many of these countries—already struggling with pockets of epidemic poverty and a grave imbalance of resources—are certain now to topple over into total chaos.

To be completely honest about it, I lied the first two times she caught me.

“It had to be Shane,” was what I said the first time, shaking my head at the screen like I, too, was disgusted beyond belief. And, believe it or not, I was, in my own way, disgusted.

You know what I mean, don’t you, when you get up in the morning and walk through to the kitchen, tousle-haired, yawning and scratching your bum, and in the kitchen the man drinking coffee and eating toast isn’t your husband, and the children playing with their Coco Pops aren’t your children, and the man who isn’t your husband says, “Morning darling, sleep well?”

He hadn’t counted on Rachel’s lasting presence in his life when he first approached the small, peculiarly dressed, redheaded girl standing with her face only inches from his favorite student’s lithograph.

Melvin taught me his layering technique which maximized on the taste of all the ingredients. Instead of lumping the lettuce on one side and cramming the meat into the other, they were layered into the sandwich. A layer of veggies, then a layer of cheese, then a layer of meat. This pattern continued so that all the main ingredients were evenly distributed. When you bit into the sandwich, you experienced the whole taste in your mouth. It was in the layers. It was how the sandwich was meant to be eaten. 

All the street kids were angry but the hustler boys were the angriest of all, especially the straight ones who had no desire to have sex with men but did it just to survive.

Talk turned one night to the subject of heroism in the modern age. At one point in the conversation, somebody (Ivy probably) claimed that a world that allowed for Toddlers & Tiaras on prime time television categorically could not allow for ‘heroism’ on the scale of the ancients.

Tomorrow he would drive to Belfast, or maybe Bucksport, to look for a job. Pearl Staples would be hanging around Perry’s during her sister Evie’s shift when he went to get a crabmeat sandwich and Orangina in a glass bottle. Tomorrow, he would sit next to the bell at the lighthouse and breathe in salt air and seaweed, near a beach whose sand was made of stones and broken mussel shells, nothing you’d want to walk on barefoot.