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.” tampa alissa nutting sample

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, I think

My newest client, Mrs. Hendricks, has skin the color of a faded Publix coupon and eyes that have been surgically widened into two wet, panicked coins. She wants a house “close to the good hospital” but far from “the changing neighborhoods,” which is code for everything she won’t say aloud. I show her a split-level in Palma Ceia with a pool shaped like a kidney. The water is the color of a melted peppermint patty. She stares at it and whispers, “My husband used to float.” You’re the only place where I can be

I drive back over the Howard Frankland Bridge, the bay below me the color of a dirty aquarium. I roll down the window and let the wind eat my hair. Another soul tucked into a stucco coffin. Another commission check for a woman who teaches tenth-grade English and thinks about her students’ fathers during third period.

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.”