The neighbourhood she grew up in was a harsh place, but she barely noticed. Maybe she was just lucky; maybe even the drug dealers and petty thugs recognised something of the magic in her and left her alone; maybe it was out of awe or respect for her sheer audacity or fearlessness that they let her walk down the street untouched, or dance across their front lawns in the rain. Hers was a charmed life. Not charmed like a princess in a storybook with a gilded cover, but charmed nonetheless. She had her share of troubles. More than her share; a fact so often missed by those whose own troubles she was wont to go to such lengths to lessen. Still, a stubbed toe was like as not to lead to the discovery of a shiny penny.

The world outside her back door was a magical place: the path down the back garden was a yellow brick road, the crawling space under the hedge led to the old forest, and it was a simple matter of pushing aside the loose palings in the back fence to find the great wide world – Oz, Neverland, Middle Earth, Camelot. The slow moving decay of suburban America. White paling fences, paint peeling in the relentless sun that beats down uniformly from a blue sky, featureless but for the power lines that sway in the breeze that teases the air above but does not reach the streets below; turf, once well kept, now ragged at the edges and patchy with brown spots and poorly tended weeds; cracked pavement lining cracked asphalt, and the faded yellow lines that reach to the horizon.