Caucasian woman, late 20s with long brown hair, pink and green stripes down each side, wearing long, worn leather black coat and chunky black boots, face pale with powder, eyes lined in thick liquid.

The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls (Scribner)

Page 32:

One night a few days later, I suddenly woke up. The air was hot and stifling. I smelled smoke and then saw flames leaping at the open window. At first I couldn’t tell if the fire was inside or outside, but then I saw that one of the curtains, only a few feet from my bed, was ablaze.

It’s not hard to imagine the drop from her second floor window. She’s played it out, confident that she could kick out the screen, sit on the ledge, and shimmy herself around to face the wall. Dangling by her fingers, her body stretched to its limits, the drop would be minimized to only a few feet. The worst she’d suffer is a sprained ankle, if that. That’s why she told her baby girl to stay at her grandmother’s for the night, why she bought an extra pack of Marlboros just in case he finished his pack and there wasn’t anything left to leave lit on the sofa cushion after he’d fallen asleep and she’d gone up to bed.

East Indian woman, early 20s, with coarse hair, wearing wide-brimmed, black and white checkered baseball hat, black and white striped hoodie, and low slung skinny jeans with gemmed belt buckle.

Skim, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (Groundwood Books)

She stands at the edge of the bar nervously watching the girls around the pool tables suck their long necks and rack up another go round. She nurses a ginger ale in a short glass. Old trick. Her mother will pick her up in 47 minutes outside the Mars Diner. She’ll have had a grilled cheese sandwich and too much coffee. That will explain the minty gum, the reason she wasn’t there when her mother arrived, because she had to get gum, now get off my case, and let’s just go home already.

Caucasian woman, early 20s, with long brown hair, far part, bangs swept over one eye, wearing black wharf jacket, pale blue eyes looking to the side over her high collar.

Shameless Magazine, Issue 11, Winter/Spring 2008 (Shameless Media)

Page 23:

These moments of connection inspire much of my activism, academic and artistic work, which seeks to challenge our ideas about sexiness. I was tired of never seeing sexy images of people with disabilities. So, after much thought, and encouragement from my best friend (who’s an amazing photographer), we decided to change that.

Mrs. M (Maciejewski) was of no relation. She had worked with the girl’s grandmother twenty years earlier in the secretarial pool of a small but successful company that sold ice to restaurants and, eventually, larger corporations and the occasional fair ground. Everyone needed ice.

Mrs. M moved into the retirement home a year after her husband died. She’d done all the cooking, all the bill keeping. But he’d done all the driving. Their car hadn’t so much as left the garage for five years but should the need arise, should she, for example, need to get to the hospital, he’d argued, he was the one with the license. And he’d be damned.

Caucasian female, with long, pale red hair and pleasant smile, switching around two oversized art pieces with some difficulty. The book sits page down on a red stool, it’s cover instantly recognizable.

For One More Day, Mitch Albom, Hyperion

Folded over, near the beginning:

She was wearing blue slacks and a white sweater now—she was always dressed, it seemed, no matter how early in the morning—and she looked to be no older than the last time I had seen her, on her seventy-ninth birthday, wearing these red-rimmed glasses she got as a present. She turned her palms gently upward and she beckoned me with her eyes and, I don’t know, those glasses, her skin, her hair, her opening the back door the way she used to when I threw tennis balls off the roof of our house.

Their first Easter she stayed offside, her jobs limited to placing the cutlery and running the sweeper once around the table. She lit some candles and poured a glass of wine, on her second by the time family started to arrive, keeping tight and tidy to the end of a couch she’d occupied day in and out for months, playing cards, watching television, adjusting hips and elbows for comfort.

Caucasian woman, mid 30s, wearing glasses, gray hat, black and white checkered coat, Sorel Caribou winter boots, and carrying a lululemon bag and red knapsack.

Wild Ducks Flying Backward, Tom Robbins (Bantam)

Page 115:

Radical problems call for radical solutions. Conventional politicians are too thickheaded to conceive of radical solutions and too fainthearted to implement them if they could…

She was surprised to see him walking alone in the city. He was taller than she’d expected and on foot. She’d only ever seen him pictured on a bike. Even from the waist up, she’d always imagined him sitting on his 12 speed: during a press conference; addressing the House; bounding down the stairs of his three-storey house, braking hard for his aging mother-in-law, pulling his eldest onto the handlebars for a quick spin to the Kim Moon Bakery, a bag of red bean buns a late morning snack. He passed her, chin straight, eyes forward, his Olympian beret too snug for his head, a gift, she thought, perhaps from the medalist. She watched his heels roll off the pavement and up onto the sidewalk, readying his outstretched hand to greet the man who sells the custom fedoras from a wheelchair in his shop’s doorway. Then he disappeared down a side street, his shoelaces tripping under rubber soles.

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See you Tuesday!