The Fat Baby Stories By Eugene Richards

THE FAT BABY Stories by Eugene Richards

EXCERPTS

SELECTED BOOKS

New York: Phaidon Press, Inc, 2004

I don’t know why I was so focused on Sarah. Maybe because she always talked to me when some of the others wouldn’t. Maybe it was the way she looked. Sarah had the palest blue eyes, which, no matter what, always looked worried, and dead white skin, meaning it had a grayish hue and no shine. It was her skin that betrayed how tired, medicated, and depressed she was. it wasn’t hard to imagine her dying. Dead white skin, red blotches like half-healed blisters, long wispy bleach-blond hair, wearing a little girl’s plain, above-the-knee cotton dress, she’d blow into a room larger than a sickly, nowhere-to-turn gang girl ought to.

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Fat Baby continued

Sarah could be loud, and if someone didn’t like it, so what. She’d tell no matter who it was that she wasn’t talking to them anyway. She could be so much in people’s faces—cops’ faces, rival gang members’ faces, lovers’ faces—that I’d become afraid for her, more afraid for her than for the other girls. Then, almost in the next breath she would soften, become warm and flirtatious, so that almost everyone in the house was swayed.