Contemporaneous: Chapters 33 – 34
33. I want to think I’m being magnanimous when it comes to Melody, but there she is, chatting gaily with Shia, them casting occasional glances in my direction, followed by the occasional giggle. This is like high school etiquette, although I never truly engaged in it, always feeling like I was on the outer of some joke. Most people wouldn’t have let it bother them. Psychos would’ve stewed and plotted carnage. I was somewhere in the middle, stewing but impotent. Can you believe he thinks he can teach me how to write good? I imagine Melody saying. Have you read his books? Shia would shoot back. Why would I bother?…
Contemporaneous: Chapters 23 – 24
23. Like when the car hit me, there’s no pain. But there is a sudden sense of shearing, of weight falling from me until all the aches of being almost fifty, the pain in my foot and leg, the tiredness in my body, and the inebriation in my head, shred, like they’re nothing more than tissue paper holding me, and I’m immersed in a thick grey mist. And I see everything because, as the cliché goes, it’s almost like life flashing before my eyes, but instead it’s a rapid recount: my birth; running happily around as a kid; school and my first teacher, am amputee without a right hand, which…