Rant

that spider, neither of us could breathe out. The moment Rant breathed, the spider had bit him. He inhaled, and I inhaled, and Rant said, “Roll down your window.”
    I opened the window.
    Leaning across me, Rant stuck his hand into the night air. Shaking the spider into the bushes next to the car, he said, “Good night, Dorry.”
    Leaned across my lap, his hips pressed into mine, I could already feel the effects of the black widow spider venom.
    Todd Rutz ( Coin Dealer): About the same time the Casey kid was selling me coins, I met Lew Terry. Terry used to bring me a few good specimens. If I recall, a 1910 Indian Head quarter in extremely fine condition. A 1907 Liberty Head quarter in AU-50 condition. Nothing spectacular, but I bought them. It wasn’t until the police interviewed me that I found out Terry and Casey lived in the same apartment house.
    Echo Lawrence: As Rant’s lips move down my throat, I challenge him to smell what type of birth control I’m on. As his lips move down my chest, Rant says, “None. You had your period thirty-four—no—thirty-six hours ago.” When I said “down my throat,” I meant on the outside.
    Todd Rutz: This Lew Terry character, it’s obvious he’s a born Nighttimer. Pale. His face and hands clear as the skin he was born into. Always he wore the same oily-brown trench coat and a knitted kind of brown stocking hat pulled down too far.
    Echo Lawrence: “Besides,” Rant says, “why would a virgin use birth control?”
    Todd Rutz: One night in my shop, this Terry character offers me the Liberty Head and the Indian Head and tells me he needs to see fifteen hundred dollars out of the deal.
    Echo Lawrence: Of course I was a virgin. With this twisted little branch for an arm. Half the time I couldn’t tell, but I’d be drooling out one corner of my mouth. The palsy side. With my job, I’d made a cottage fucking industry out of being as unappealing as possible. Do you think I could just vamp it up? Snap my fingers, and go from sideshow freak to sex kitten?
    Todd Rutz: Time passed, and the Casey kid would turn up with lesser and lesser coins. Buffalo nickels. Wheat pennies. Nothing worth remembering. His stash had to be running low.
    Echo Lawrence: The next night, Rant sent me two dozen red fucking roses. And the keys to a Galaxie 500.
    Shot Dunyun: Those bullshit rabies shots took forever. It didn’t help that I kept reinfecting myself with my own toothbrush. By the end, my port went as dead as the knob on the back of Rant Casey’s neck. Beyond dead.
    Lew Terry: The only other detail I remember from Casey’s apartment, stuck on the wall next to his bed, I found all these little lumps. Round and dark, like bugs. Soft, like little balls of hashish. Except they didn’t taste like hash.
    Echo Lawrence: Our first night alone in the Eldorado, all I could think was: Thank God the leather seats are dark burgundy. 22–A History
    From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms ( Historian): For myself, personally, my reason for participating in Party Crash events is quite simple: I hold my life as precious. I adore my friends and family. I treasure my health and the myriad capabilities of my aged yet healthy body and mind.
    I consider myself to be enormously gifted with good fortune, but accidents do happen. Annually in this nation, approximately sixteen thousand people are murdered. During the same period of time, approximately forty-three thousand die in motor-vehicle accidents. Every time I operate a motor vehicle, all of what I treasure can be taken. Stolen in an instant without due process. When you’re aboard a motor vehicle, death passes within a finger’s length every few moments. Anytime a vehicle passes mine in the oncoming lanes, I could be subjected to torture more violent and painful than anything the world’s dictators would ever stoop to inflict. Perhaps another
    driver has eaten nothing except hamburgers for his entire life, and as his car approaches mine on the freeway, his clogged heart fails. Blind with pain, he clutches his seizing chest. His automobile veers to one side, colliding with mine, and forcing me into another car, a gasoline tanker truck, a guardrail, over a cliff.
    Despite my lifetime of declining rich desserts, my evenings spent jogging, regardless of all my careful moderation and selfdiscipline—I’m trapped, wadded inside a shell of steel and aluminum. My body, violated in countless places by fragments of broken glass. My low-cholesterol