Alicia’s neighbor was a college student whose name she didn’t know. He had knocked on Alicia’s door and, when she answered, pointed to a black cat lying crushed in the parking lot next to a dumpster. Alicia ran outside in her nightgown and picked up her cat.

Stephen suggested that they have sex on the kitchen table but Susan declined. She hadn’t brushed her teeth yet.

No sooner had I finished working, finished assembling the final cut of my movie, finished adjusting, finished revamping, finished splicing the last two images together, finished mixing the last two sets of sounds,

Here, after midnight on the seventh floor, room service is provided by a refugee. Her name—unlikely consonants, and then too many vowels—is printed on an apron tag. Her face is fiery, peppered by the many sweets she sucks from “late till six” as she sits on her hard chair at what the waiters call the Bus Station. It is her job to collect the ordered trays of food and drink from the service hatch and take them down the corridors—now reeking of cigars, cheap scent and cannabis, and far from silent with the clatterings of one-night stands and thoughtless television sets and arguments—to restless, needy men who ought to be in bed asleep. A man, awake beyond midnight, is unpredictable.

As soon as I said I was thirty, I wondered why I had said it. “Thirty,” said the woman I was talking to, who had a tousled gamine haircut, dyed white as only a very young woman will risk.

The building was frustrating. Was that because the person who lived in it was?

There is a nothing sound that rooms make that is easier to hear when a room is empty.

As soon as Farley’s collar was unhooked, he took the nearest, steepest slope down into the dell. By the time he reached the bottom, he was fishtailing a little, his looser back legs having descended slightly faster than his front ones. He fetched up between a black Lab mix named Scout and Scout’s owner. To get between a rival dog and its owner was strategy. Cut off the opposing army from its supply.

“Seen anything good?” Scout’s owner asked.

Jacob was in the habit of bringing his camera to the park, and it was around his neck. “A wasp’s nest, but it’s too high. Did you start that job at the hospital?”

There was a bush that emitted a strong smell almost exactly like that of semen. Some men and women noticed it as they passed by. It was rather shocking, in a vicar’s garden.

Fang’s internment was a momentous affair. Everyone showed, even Dr. Cobbam, whose refusal to replace an arthritic hip socket with stainless had no doubt hastened Fang’s end, and demanded of my