For Gordon and Cheryl Baptiste
In Wildness is the preservation of the world.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, in which these stories first appeared: Best Life: “Bulletproof ”; Harper’s:
“Question 62” and “Admiral”; The Kenyon Review: “Hands On”; McSweeney’s: “Wild Child”; The New Yorker: “La Conchita,” “Sin Dolor,” “The Lie,” “Thirteen Hundred Rats” and “Ash Monday”; The Paris Review: “Balto”; Playboy: “The Unlucky Mother of Aquiles Maldonado” and “Three Quarters of the Way to Hell”; and A Public Space: “Anacapa.”
“Balto” also appeared in The Best American Stories, 2007, edited by Stephen King (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), and “Admiral”
in The Best American Stories, 2008, edited by Salman Rushdie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008). The author would also like to acknowledge Harlan Lane’s The Wild Boy of Aveyron and Roger Shattuck’s The Forbidden Experiment as sources of certain factual details in “Wild Child.”