So this is how it happened.  There was a woman.  Her name was Maria.  She was a writer.  She was pretty and she was young.  Or at least, I thought she was pretty.  She wrote poems which contained fire, and sex, and the absence of vague sensations, and lace, and were filled with a young person’s sense of boundless, undirected potential.  She had a house in an expensive suburb, a house that came from her father, who was an oilman, heavily invested in industry and production, and who enjoyed the fruits of his colossal ambition and drive for money (he dreamed, he once told Maria, only of falling gold coins, the kind that Kings used to spend), buying houses, diamonds, art, and truly extravagant overseas trips.  Maria took advantage of all of this, but primarily she wrote, and threw parties, parties filled with writers, mostly young, unestablished, starving writers, but sometimes older, respected, hungry writers.  Never the fat ones, the bestsellers.  She had them and her face became pinched and white if a writer who had sold enough books to have a mortgage, live on a nice street, and raise a family, ever dared to come to one of her parties and eat her food.

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The above piece of writing comprises part of my fragments project, some of which are available on this website.  I intend to add new fragments piecemeal, not in any particular order, and as the occasion take me.