Excerpt from And I could not keep the night from coming in

The yellow car slides through the girl with light in her palms. Charles spent the day frowning, equipped with two squares of fabric in his breast pocket, he drank lemon grass by the shot and he listened to a man sing out the souls of a lost people buried beneath a burning building. The girl is tucked between the granite and the black car and becomes a form like nothing. Charles glides his luck into her but it still cuts. As a child Charles loved to jump back across the engravings of tires while wearing his favorite yellow hat. The girl begins crawling into the hood of the car. The Rich Men know the girl and they know Charles and they know nothing of suffering. Charles’ father was a fishmonger and as a child Charles avoided the ice, yelling to all the suffering gills LAVA! LAVA! Someone on a nearby lawn decides, Baby’s cry because they like crying. The girl had labored next to dull corpses for three years, deciphering the surgical code of the men in white coats working the floors above, only now understanding the actual limit of flesh and seeing her own code open up before her.