Tampa Alissa Nutting Sample ((link)) Site

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.

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.” tampa alissa nutting sample

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. I drive back over the Howard Frankland Bridge,

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. Another commission check for a woman who teaches

“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, 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.