Excerpt from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Descending the smooth dusty pitch of the canal, she looked down at the bonfire and then beyond it, where someone had set off a bottle rocket. She saw the little puff of smoke and heard the snap. Just then—at exactly the instant the snap reached her, so that the moment was ever-seared into her memory as a tiny explosion—something slammed into her knees. She looked down to see a shivering, towheaded child wrapped around her legs.

Luz could not remember the last time she'd seen a little person. The child was maybe two years old. A girl, Luz somehow knew, though she wore only a shoddy cloth diaper, its seat dark with soil. She looked up at Luz with eyes like gray-blue nickels, sunk into skeletal sockets. Her skin was translucent, larval, and Luz had the sense that if she checked the girl's belly she would be able to discern the shadows of organs inside.

"Hi there," Luz said.

The child stared unblinking with her coin eyes.

"Are you lost?" asked Luz. "Where's your mommy?" The girl's forehead bulged subtly above the brow and she pressed it now into Luz's crotch. Luz, embarrassed, tried to pry the girl from her legs. But the child clutched tighter and let loose a high, sorrowful moan. Luz went weak with pity.

"Shh," she said. "You're okay." Luz patted her back then, unthinkingly, put her fingers in the child's whiteblond hair, tufted like meringue at the nape.

Excerpted from Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins. Copyright © 2015 by Claire Vaye Watkins. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.