First, do anything but be alone. Date lots of people you will remember by comparing them to various vegetables you have seen in the produce section in the grocery store.
Being Alone
Rotten Fruit
“Well you got a mighty fine memory, donchya?” Leland said. “All them Hargroves live down this way.” Sophie recognized the name as soon as he said it, the Hargroves, whom she knew as the main black family of Azalea.
Bessy Hargrove was her grandmother’s best friend, and the last time Sophie was in Azalea they attended her ninety-eighth birthday party in the Azalea Baptist Church. They had been the only white people there, occupying one table in the back near the buffet tables, yet Sophie distinctly remembered they were ordered to take their food first.
My Secret Place
“It's San Francisco,” she replied. “I've gotten raises and promotions and you're working, but we're struggling to get by. We couldn't even afford to take time off for a vacation last year.”
They both hated what the City had become, an overpriced playground for tech geeks working at Google, Uber, and Airbnb. Once sketchy nightclub areas had been gentrified into neighborhoods where newcomers fought over four thousand dollar a month, one-bedroom apartments.
The Cheap Shit Gets You Drunk the Fastest
“If Nadine got into Heaven, ain’t nobody going to Hell,” Sally Simpson, one of the girls she’s standing with, says under her breath...
The Falcon’s Choice
He watched her hesitate for a second and wondered if this would be the time when she chose her freedom over him.
Partir
I shed my layers like an old skin – my shawl, the netted muslin at my throat, my underskirt – until all that remains is the shell of my dress, as sea green as the gown of Loro Kidu.