In the dark Edgar Haney walked from his truck and turned up the sidewalk to the cafe. It was an hour before light, and he shuddered inside his coat as the cold touched his flesh. And this is the thing that came to him. 

I am one of the howlers: those who, when left alone, whine and howl for the return of they know not what. Piped-in music has been known to help, but only if it is Grand Opera, one kind of howling offsets the other. I have known this about myself for years; but it was not until I watched the tiger at the zoo and realized that it was autistic, that its stripes had become bars and its howling days were over, that I began to take people’s decorations more seriously.

The old man inserted the green betelnut between the molars of his good side, and bit it in half. He thoughtfully removed the nut. He planed away a little of the inner pulp, carefully, with a battered, broad-nailed thumb. This old man was one of the sixteen chiefs of Belau, but he had a laborer’s hands. 

“IT ALL STARTED ONE AFTERNOON WHEN I WAS LOOKING AROUND FOR SOMETHING UNUSUAL TO WEAR ON MY HEAD.”

“EVIDENTLY THE USE OF SEA SHELLS IS AS VARIED AS YOU CARE TO MAKE IT.”

The room was about thirty feet by twenty. There was a door leading into the room from the hall. There was a French window, and a larger window looking over the landscape, down to the village, across the harbor, out to the bay. There was a fireplace, and in the grate early in the morning before it was cleaned were the remains of last night's fire. 

I had not seen Samuel for years, but his letters annoyed me. They were so melancholy, so sad. I couldn’t figure it out. In 1970 I returned to Manhattan for the summer and called him. “I’m double the size I was when you knew me; so is Doris; we eat all the time. Don’t you?” We made a date and I broke it—too depressing.

Mr. Russell, the not-old man who was old, arrived at arbitrary intervals in the mornings, fragmenting her energies as a stubborn thumb crushes a walnut. His cheeks were packed with silver bristles bulging like the sides of a fish. He tongued a cigar. 

In the gray light, a yacht, decrepit. Her varnished cabin sides are patchy and her white hull is stained with rust; her after deck, under a torn flapping canopy, is littered with cartons and refuse. A few 

It is a runny night. Wind blows and the rain falls. I sit growling. My pad is in my hand and the stub of a pencil. Nothing comes. I eat Oreos. Each fattens me. Fat encases me. I will smother under lard at this rate. But they keep me from smoking. If I smoke my lungs will give out.

Port-au-Prince has become an amputated town, throbbing in upon itself. Grief muffles the rhythms of this Caribbean port city—tourists gone, trade vanished, a crazed dictator pressing the Haitian millions into misery. Still, amid desolation and dismay, the smell of ripe mangoes is good, sun and salt are good, the sway of Creole girls a? they go about their day is a happy reminder of time that was and time still to come—why not?