The Glass Girl: Part 3: Days 9–1 Short Name

I miss her so much. I miss him. And I want nothing more than to ask her, in what little time I have left, how Ricci is, but I can’t quell this burning inside me.

Brandy sidles up to me in the goat and chicken enclosure.

Charlotte comes out with a big bag in her arms, staggering a little under its weight.
“Right here,” she says. “Don’t have a cow.”

She pauses. “I can’t afford to get nostalgic. If I relapse on the outside, there’s nothing to lift me back up. Not after what I did.”

She pauses. “I can’t afford to get nostalgic. If I relapse on the outside, there’s nothing to lift me back up. Not after what I did.”

“Right,” Fran says. “I needed those when I was withdrawing. I needed them through the first parts of my recovery. I needed to do something to myself. Cigarettes are insidious, but they’re legal. Glamorous, to some...."

“Addiction of any kind sits in your brain like a cat with yarn, Nick,” Fran says. “Batting around your synapses and impulses and logic for sport....”

“Addiction of any kind sits in your brain like a cat with yarn, Nick,” Fran says. “Batting around your synapses and impulses and logic for sport....”

“Is it some mystical land of understanding and enlightenment?” I ask, getting off my bed and sighing loudly.

Gideon reaches across the pit and holds out her hand. “I get it.”
Billy takes her hand. “Solidarity,” he says.

In the distance, far off, I can hear coyotes howling. It makes me a little lonely for Dad’s apartment. There’s an arroyo behind it, and a lot of coyotes and javelinas travel up it to move through the city.

“Come on!” wheedles the guy whose name I don’t know.

And you know what Tracy brings her? Some sort of actual fire-starting contraption that’s not a lighter but something akin to a tiny cell phone and does what a lighter does, and suddenly, Brandy has a spark that she desperately, lovingly blows, practically crooning to it as she transfers it delicately to her bundle and bam.
A fire.

“It sounds like there are some issues with your dad, and we don’t need to go into that? I kind of got the gist by your very one-sided conversation, but you should know...he calls here every day.”

It's as familiar as an old sweater you thought you lost but find buried on the bottom of the closet under shoes and old comics....It smells fusty from disuse but you put it on anyway and instantly its warmth, that feeling of comfort, rushes right back to you as you bury yourself in it.