clouding up the glass with his breath, staring at me or not, I never keep the curtains open long enough to find out.

She was looking right at me sort of dreamily, happily, like what bliss, what fun, isn’t it?

they’re all looking at me and smiling like I’m the actual sun. Smiling with the whole of their mouths and eyes.

her voice like a thick mist,

Everything in that other life was stretched and gleaming and perfumed. Each room had a temperature I could control with the turn of a little dial. I should have felt like God. Instead I forgot that I had ever been poor. It grew so normal so quickly, that life. In my memory of this time, I sit looking bored out the window onto the most beautiful,

in his deep Scottish lilt.

her head of long, silver faery-witch locks in our direction.

obscenely beautiful

their lip-glossed mouths forming whispery words.