Tampa Alissa Nutting Sample [extra Quality] May 2026

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.

“The master bedroom faces west,” I say, gesturing to a room where the afternoon sun makes the dust motes look like airborne maggots. “You can watch the sunset melt the highway.” 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,

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.” Another commission check for a woman who teaches