“There isn’t much in the house,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”

Kayla looked around, shrugged. “I’m not even that hungry.”

Mary set the table, bright Fiestaware on place mats alongside fringed cloth napkins. They ate microwave pizzas.

“Gotta have something a little fresh,” Mary’s boyfriend, Dennis, said cheerily, heaping spinach leaves from a plastic bin onto his pizza. He seemed pleased by his ingenuity. Kayla ate the spinach, took a few bites of crust. Mary poured her more water.

At 29 years of age, completely satisfied with the gentle Fall outside, with vast stretches of contentment ahead of me in an unbroken melloyello greenery, I took my head in my hands and I considered 

My name is José, I am Catholic and I was not a plainclothes policeman very long. In Argentina I wrote poetry and prayed to the Virgin every day for my mother who was a cancerous balloon grounded in the chicken shack behind the house and for my two sisters who tap-tapped their way past my window every hour drowned in lipstick and sperm.

Victor Franks, because he worked nights, and perhaps because his metabolism, as his ex-wife once suggested, was slower than average, did not function very well in the morning. He was a man who lacked the few simple habits that breed contentment. 

The slabs of marble were stacked in huge, sturdy heaps extending over nearly the entire deck of the ship and mounting toward the stern. A number of very wide pieces formed rough bases for these heaps.

It was toward the end of the week when I received the telephone call.

This isn’t that classic conceit where you tell a story about someone and it’s really just a story about yourself.

The snow stood up in drifts around the edges of the frozen pond. Gusts of wind cleaned away huge irregular circles on the surface of the pond, so that, as the sun set behind the scattered hills near the bay,

This is the beach that outlined an entire continent. The water on the sand and the water in the air were indistinguishable. At that time, the Emperor was watching the crepe butterflies. He approached the field where his nieces were playing and hid behind some tufted bushes.

This is a street that tries our credulity. A caterpillar truck has just overturned, arching its middle into the air. The neighbors appear. The driver wriggles out unhurt.