Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

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Tiffany knocked. She heard someone—her subject, she guessed, though the step seemed too spry—approach the door and snap open the locks. The ornate brass doorknob eased about.

Kyle Hardwick’s weather-beaten face caught Tiffany by surprise, it glowed so with life. More like a horny teenager’s, those eyes of his, than a man about to celebrate his hundred and twentieth year. His skin was cracked and scored like old parchment. Some boyhood disfigurement had marked the flesh from his nose to the shell-curve of his ears, as if a shockwave of some sort had blasted it.

“By my reckoning, you’d be the lovely Miss Walker, oral historian extraordinaire,” he said in tones rich with the sounds of sagebrush and rawhide.

His eyes danced like campfires, his voice as thick and downhome as hickory smoke. Kyle’s face, she thought, might even be considered handsome in a perverse geriatric way. A thrill coursed through her. If his memories and the telling of them lived up to this preamble, she might come away with not just something for her archives but an honest-to-God spoken-word recording. She might even spark the interest of a documentarian, a pro like Chip Kendall, whom she had met and bedded in Waco at a conference the summer before.

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