Liberty had never cared for Halloween. The night gave the false hope that when one was summoned to the door by a stranger’s knock, one’s most horrible fears could be realized by the appearance of ghosts, bats, ambulatory corpses, and the headless hounds of hell.

A young woman gets on a small feeder plane in Peoria, a real old-timey number, a DC something, the aisle so steep that she has to grab on to the seats and pull her way up. The lights on the wall are pale yellow. “Smoking or no smoking?” The stewardess, flight attendant that is, laughs, because there is only one other passenger on the plane, a big bald-headed man. 

My wife says it would be nice to win the lottery because then we could pay off the second mortgage, and I tell her that the odds she’s counting on for that are the same ones that malice it unlikely that she’ll be incinerated by a meteor on the way to work or even get hit by a bus or fall on the third rail and get fricasseed, all of which is perfectly possible, but statistics say it’s unlikely so why doesn’t she just relax. 

For what our friend Madame de Rocattefours, herself gaining all simplicities with age, calculated to be almost a month, the cat had been languishing; as the days flooded with spring and nervously passed it took pleasure in sitting to watch the light stream through the bank of laced windows, its nostrils flaring and acquiescing. 

“Daogiri,” said Abdullah, their chauffeur-guide, gesturing freely, “is an impregnable fortress. Absolutely. The sides are so steep and smooth that an ant could not climb them —nor even a snake.”

From a mile’s distance, where Stanley Bendana, rounding out a two-year stint in the Peace Corps with a tour of South India, and Mrs. Majumdar had stopped on the roadside for a panoramic view, the citadel had looked impressive enough: a cone of gray rock with a scarped waist that rose sheer from the flat, brown Deccan plateau.

I had to sue my landlord to get out of my apartment and then sue him to get back in and get my stuff. Here’s how it works. Every evening I go in with two uniformed patrolmen and check on my bags. I suspect my landlord would like to steal them. He is stealing them.

One at a time, the armed men come down dusty, winding gullies to the steeper arroyos, their chaps and boots glinting in the afternoon sunlight. They descend gulches to the floor of the canyon, a thin band of trees and rock that winds along the creekside. Sixteen men who have never seen one another before, but who are expecting one another, since no one else would care to make the journey to this canyon, or is even aware of its existence.

I was on the back porch washing greens when Harold drove around the side of the house with a stolen canoe on top of the truck and a bushel of oysters in back.

“I thought you were down fishing on the flats,” I said as he came up the steps with the oysters in a sack over his shoulder. 

As reported in Mawrdew Czgowchwz, Mawrdew Czgowchwz, oltrano, born Maev Cohalen at Convent-on-the-Rock, Connemara, on Easter Sunday, 1916, left New York in the fall of 1956 to go to Dublin to star in the motion picture Pilgrim Soul, the story of Great Flaming Maev Cohalen, her mother, Ireland’s Joan of Arc. The picture, a Hyperion Productions feature, directed by Orphrey Whither, graphy in early November.

He’s sitting there staring at a piece of paper in front of him. He’s trying to break it down. He says,

I’m breaking it all down. The ticket was $600 and then after that there was more for the hotel and food and so on, for just ten days.