Dear Edward

by Ann Napolitano

Florida has seen her husband, the brainy Jewish guy, and she imagines they have semi-regular decent sex but don’t spend a lot of time cuddling or making out. It’s her belief that people sealed up that tight can often benefit from some medicinal loosening. They have no idea how to unzip their own boundaries; they need them removed on their behalf. If she had any mushrooms on her, she would have slipped them into the woman’s purse. The plane gives a single judder as she lowers into her seat. “What’s up, pussycat?” she says, at the same time reflecting that she wouldn’t offer this girl any drugs. Linda’s uptight too, but in a disheveled way. Her wires are crossed and split and her energy flow is a mess. Psychedelics would just loosen her death grip on normalcy, and seconds later she’d be screaming, naked, in the street.

This passage amuses me, and Florida is certainly one of my favorite characters in the book. I happened to read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series while I was doing research for Dear Edward, and Gaiman is such a master at joyfully defying boundaries like space, time and distance, that I found myself thinking, Why can't I have a character who believes she's lived multiple lives? For this reason, I feel like Florida is more a Neil Gaiman creation, than my own.