MAGELLAN JONES WROTE epic poems in which Greek gods talked like 1920s gangsters. The gimmick had worn thin a decade ago, but by then he’d become a fixture at the North Beach café where all the disappointed poets nursed their demitasses of espresso grounds. Magellan held his fiftieth birthday party at that café, and he must have said the wrong thing, at last a wisecrack too sharp—because Dolly plunged the cake knife into Magellan’s chest, all the way up to the handle. His only friend, the only one who’d put up with his shit all along. She missed his heart, but she broke his heart. He could feel the dirty knife all the way inside him, the buttercream frosting too sugary for any bacteria to resist, and of course every last bug was antibiotic resistant nowadays. Magellan’s trademark Kangol hat whirled underfoot as he swayed, dying on his feet because he was a poet, dammit. Dolly cried and shook until her rainbow hair extensions fell out. Someone called an ambulance, but they shouldn’t have wasted their—

A woman touched Magellan’s forehead and whispered that she liked his poetry (mentioning one poem by title) while she slid the knife all the way out. His fatal wound became a minor laceration as the knife withdrew. He opened his eyes to see who had done this, but the woman was already gone.

Magellan fell to his knees at last, and Dolly wept on his shoulder until he took her face in his hands and said he forgave her and he was sorry.

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JAKE DUG THROUGH the lesions on his arms, trying to find a pristine spot along a vein, when he looked up to see a woman’s hand suspending a ten-dollar bill over his box lid. “I’m worried about you, Jake,” the woman said, though he couldn’t see her face. “You seem worse than last week. Listen, if I give you ten bucks, will you swear never to do recreational drugs again?” He said yes and took the money. He soon discovered that hypodermic needles broke against his skin, every. Single. Time. Jake could still carve his skin with knives or nails, but even then the needle would snap against his vein. He was getting the frozen sweats already.

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