Wild Child and Other Stories

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Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: Best Life: “Bulletproof ”; Harper’s:

“Question 62” and “Admiral”; The Kenyon Review: “Hands On”; McSweeney’s: “Wild Child”; The New Yorker: “La Conchita,” “Sin Dolor,” “The Lie,” “Thirteen Hundred Rats” and “Ash Monday”; The Paris Review: “Balto”; Playboy: “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado” and “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”; and A Public Space: “Anacapa.”

“Balto” also appeared in The Best American Stories, 2007, edited by Stephen King (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and “Admiral”

in The Best American Stories, 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). The author would also like to acknowledge Harlan Lane’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron and Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment as sources of certain factual details in “Wild Child.”

There were two kinds of truths, good truths and hurtful ones. That was what her father’s attorney was telling her, and she was listening, doing her best, her face a small glazed crescent of light where the sun glanced off the yellow kitchen wall to illuminate her, but it was hard. Hard because it was a weekday, after school, and this was her free time, her chance to breeze into the 7-Eleven or Instant Message her friends before dinner and homework closed the day down. Hard too because her father was there, sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping something out of a mug, not coffee, definitely not coffee.

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