Amelia and Paul moved dreaming through the color photographs of human lives in articulo mortis, in Europe, in the album. “First,” Paul said, regarding the first photograph closely, “we visit Denmark’s unique Tivoli Gardens with their bursting green, red and blue and silver fireworks at a quarter to twelve. 

As I was saying, ladies and gentlemen, before that little unpleasantness: I have just been assured, by those in position to know, that this evening’s eminent “mystery guest” has arrived, and should be with us any time now.

The hunt had been over astonishingly quick; years later, she would realize that the best hunts stretch out four or five weeks, and sometimes never result in a taking. But this one had ended in the first 

Shaw used to be a model and is still beautiful, fierce and timid both, like a coyote or a wild dog—more beautiful, in that way, than when she modeled. Harley is strange-looking, as plain as butter, huge, and

Russell had quit his job as a coal miner on his twenty-fifth birthday, though still, five years later, he would, at various times of exertion, spray flecks of occasional blood when he coughed. 

An ice storm, following seven days of snow; the vast fields and drifts of snow turning to sheets of glazed ice that shine and shimmer blue in the moonlight as if the color is being fabricated not by the bending and absorption 

We used to go to bars, the really seedy ones, to find our fights. It excited Don. He loved going into the dark old dives, ducking under the doorway and following me in, me with my robe on, my boxing gloves tied around my neck, and all the workers inside the bar turning on their stools, turning as if some day someone special might be coming through, someone who could even help them out, perhaps—but Don and I were not there to help them out.

The first deer went through the ice when I was out in the barn working. It was January. Martha came running out of the cabin to tell me. She saw it all.

They met before midnight at the house of the richest man in Mississippi, and left shortly with a dark old leather country doctor’s satchel that was bulging with money, bulging as if trying to breathe, swollen like a dying fish’s gills: they were unable to even shut it all the way.

Karen was twenty-six. She had been engaged twice, married once. Her husband had run away with another woman after only six months. It still made her angry when she thought about it, which was not often.