I turned. The schoolground seemed to be glowing. It wasn't like night so much as like night on some high-tech movie set. Invisible machines operated … - Scott Bradfield

He opened another beer, and I warmed some canned chili on the stove. Pedro ate most of it, sponging up the red chili sauce with slices of his doughy Wonderbread. "This is a hard fast world we live in, kiddo—and I'm telling you this as a friend, now. All this teary-eyed feeling sorry for yourself childhood crap just doesn't work—doesn't work for long, anyway. I can promise you that. I mean, your mom wants you to have this idyllic childhood and all. She thinks this is Camelot or something, your childhood. Well, I want you to know, kiddo. I looked up 'idyllic' in the dictionary and I wouldn't hold my breath. I wouldn't lie in bed all day just waiting for some idyllic childhood to come along."

The body, I have often thought, is like a promise. You keep things in it. Those things are covert, immediate, yours. There is something lustrous about them. They emit energy, like radium or appliances. They can be replaced, repaired or simply discarded. The promise of the body is very firm and intact. It's the only promise we can count on, and we can't really count on it very much.

Sometimes I don't know," Rodney said, wiping his brow with the back of his greasy hand. "Sometimes I don't know if I was born mean, or if the world just made me that way.