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For the next twenty minutes, the three of us boarded and re-boarded the dismal merry-go-round, ensuring that our ride tickets weren't going to waste. I stared at the merry-go-round's chevroned metal floor and radiated shame, mentally vomiting back the treat they'd tried to give me. My mother, ever …

I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn't go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane's homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well-orchestrated it seem…

[...] She was well nigh a secular saint who saw no malice in making a gift of herself to suffering humanity. But her husband insisted on being master of his wife's virtues. 'I've had enough,' this Othello said, 'of being cuckolded by the poor.'

[...] they, were not sulking, that they had shut their mouths, it was take it or leave it, and that anger and impotence sometimes caused such pain you couldn't even cry out. They were men, that's all, and they were not about to go around smiling and simpering.

Garlands of stars were falling from the black sky above the palm tree and the houses. She ran along the short avenue, now empty, that led the fort. The cold, no longer needing to struggle against the sun, had invaded the night; the icy air burned her lungs. But she ran, half blind, in the darkness.…