“You hated going to the dojo at first: the uniformity of the place, the rote memorization required to learn the creeds, the repetitive back and forth of the techniques. And the forms, the way the Blacks moved together out there on the mats, dancing along to the soundless beat of what must be some kind of retarded disco house music, dipping and kneeling, twirling and kicking at nothing but the wide mirror running the length of the wall.”

“I made my way quietly out back and sat in Helga’s whitewashed porch swing, listening to the first faint sounds of big band music drift out of Helga’s open windows and into the cooling summer air. The darkness was moving in slow from the east, interrupted by the sparse waltz of the increasingly emboldened fireflies. The urgency with which they flared up stood in stark contrast to their measured fade back to black, like lit matchsticks being tossed in slow motion out into the purpling horizon, burning slowly down to dust.”

“You see mother was always asking me about the place so I thought “it” was the important. But it’s not, the place isn’t, important but the context “is.” The sweat and the palm and the air-drowning goldfish can be in Boca Raton or Boise or Prague or even Yourtown, and maybe it is in Yourtown (you don’t know, but now you’re suspecting); it’s the context of it that’s mattering to the air-drowning goldfish whose eyes are deadening, deadening, dead.”