Shaker: A novel

city, ten a.m. and the sky already the color of butter, and went on: “The pain, the heartbreak, and the true injustice in the black community are not gone simply because they’ve been forced into silence.”

Kelly, overcome with a feeling that she couldn’t quite define, sat down beside the kid and put her arm around him. She took a deep breath as he then leaned into her and began to sob loudly. Not so much sob as howl. She could feel him shaking and wrapped her other arm around him as well. They sat like this for a full ten minutes before her phone ran

She stood halfway up the stairs, in denim shorts and pale pink blouse, smoking a cigarette as four sweating men gingerly tucked her turnip of a husband into what could accurately be described as his final resting place.

Evan kept his focus on Miguel. “You have to show that you’re not corrupt and that you’ll stop at nothing to find those who did this. That you’re tough on the gangs. That you will tolerate no one and no policy that isn’t as tough as you are. You have to be That Guy.”

“Good-bye to you, too. I hope that psychotic French cunt finds you and turns you the fuck off forever.” “Albert’s Canadian.” “Fuck you, Roy.”

Roy knew she hated it here. There was nothing here for someone like her. She just woke up one day from one of her naps and here she was. Stuck. They all were.

At LaGuardia, he watched the ground crew out the window and, for a second, pictured his dad down there on the tarmac, leaning against a trailer full of luggage. The man in his thick glasses with the black frames, all the time grinning, pointing his index finger like a gun as he said hello to anybody who happened by. Roy stared until they called his

They eventually found that the best way to mellow out all that energy was to let him take a monster bong hit right before they got out of the car.

Roy was young, and not that wise to anything, but in that moment, any idiot could see that he was fucked. How exactly, he wasn’t sure. He just knew that once he got to the bottom of the stairs, there would be no going back up. Roy didn’t say a word when they handcuffed him, looked at his mother as they read him his rights. She told him through tear