When we closed up that night there were six empty spaces on the lot. I even sold the car I'd planned to drive to school on Monday.Millie's pep talk st...yed with me that night. I was able to read most of Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, and finish it on Sunday morning. I was in my room that afternoon, trying to make some sense of the symbolism when my grandmother said the phone was for me."Randy?" Hi," I said, recognizing her voice, thinking, this is the first time we've spoken on the phone. She. I did not say anything, as my second drink arrived and I took a sip. Mookie went on to give me a short, but thorough, description of life among the fifteen-to-twenty-thousand-some-odd Somali expatriates living in the Twin Cities area. Most of them had fled the civil war in the east African country in the early nineties, but some, like his family, had come in the early eighties. Mookie had U.S. citizenship by virtue of having been born here. Mookie told me a little more about his growing-up. I look down and see it, a pink staff protruding from the short dark forest that drapes my mound. I close my eyes and think of them again; the two men who often come to satisfy me. They were there when he was touching me moments ago. They are there when I touch myself. They are there when I suck his cock or when I fuck him. They are there beside me when he licks me. I think of them when I go to sleep and sometimes when I wake. I am obsessed with them yet I don’t know what they look like. I. "Youwon't be getting what he got, though, till you've helped me do the restof the patients in this hospital. And I'll take this."I ran my fingers down the gun barrel, stuck one in the end. I could seea look of suppressed anger cross her face. "What d'ya say, nurseFletcher? Help me do what I came here to do smooth and easy and you getyour youth and health back. Refuse and I'll shove this gun up your assand pull the trigger."Her lips curled into a snarl. "Even if you aren't afraid of a.