She buys it. They always do. I hand her the keys, and the metal is so hot from the sun it burns a little brand into my palm: a cursive S for sold . Or maybe S for sucker . It’s hard to tell in this light.
Tampa in August is a sauna lined with strip malls. The air is so thick with humidity you could chew it like taffy, and the only thing more relentless than the sun is the soft, rotting smell of the bay at low tide. This is where I sell dreams. Or rather, where I sell the illusion that a three-bedroom, two-bath with hurricane shutters and a lanai can outrun the inevitable.
She doesn’t laugh. They never laugh. That’s the secret of Tampa real estate: no one is buying a home. They are buying a vault to store their grief. A garage to park the memory of the affair they had in 1987. A walk-in closet to hide the bankruptcy papers. I unlock the sliding glass door, and the air inside is the smell of last year’s pork roast and a rug that’s seen a thousand bare feet. tampa alissa nutting sample
Tampa, I think. You beautiful, rotting manatee. You sparkler dipped in sewage. You’re the only place where I can be this honest and still get a five-star review on Zillow. This sample mimics Nutting’s use of visceral, grotesque imagery, a deadpan first-person narrator with questionable morals, and a setting (Florida) that acts as a character in itself—sultry, decaying, and absurdly comic.
“People float here all the time,” I say, smiling. My teeth feel like Chiclets glued to a gumline. “It’s the buoyancy of denial.” She buys it
I think of my own apartment in Ybor City, where the cockroaches wear tiny suits of armor and the upstairs neighbor practices the tuba at 3 AM. “Ma’am,” I say, pulling a Ziploc bag of Goldfish crackers from my purse, “in Florida, the house isn’t the thing that’s haunted. You are the thing that haunts the house.”
Mrs. Hendricks touches the blinds. Her manicured nail leaves a tiny dent in the plastic. “Is it haunted?” Or maybe S for sucker
The Realtor of Sun City Center