LIKE AN ANGEL

First published in NOON [2025]

In 2017 or 2018, I was living in Vegas with my mother in a one bedroom apartment in a suburb of Vegas, in a city called Henderson. I was very poor and quite destitute. Henderson has a high population of retirees. Each day I walked for about 20K steps. Sometimes, when I was deeply desolate, I would walk for an extra 10K steps, making it a total of 30K steps in one day. In the scorching, blazing Vegas heat. Donning dark sunglasses, a sunhat, two layers of clothing to protect myself from skin cancer. Each day I walked and each day I wrote a novella in my head and each evening, I sat down on this used dark brown leather sofa that an ex-IRS auditor had gifted my mother and, while facing an army of forest green sewing machines, I began to dictate it, me downloading the entire content from my consciousness (my own personal iCloud) to my laptop. Within three months, I wrote a novella.