I know a woman who takes mouse baths. It is true that they are white mice, that she is a singer, and that she only does so before going off to sing Thaïs. While servitors are hastening supper for the

The Dakemans were untidy degenerates, including their children and pets, according to Mom. “Some people make their pets and children as trashy as they are,” she said, her voice hushed discreetly.

“Consider, if you will, the ancient Egyptians,” Stan Duval said, just as we were sitting down to dinner. “They had the correct attitude, in my humble estimation.”

Uncle Ferris came down from Seattle to live with us in Oakland while he looked for a job. He'd been working for Boeing but had been fired for reasons he glossed over and glamorized in his favor. 

The marquis knew that he was chauvinistic. There was nothing he could do about it. The more the twentieth century pushed France into the row of little nations, the prouder he was to be a Frenchman.

I met the Russian group again at the home no, he is already dead at Hemingway’s Museum. Always the same thing. We hadn’t been there even five minutes when a penetrating stench of life also entered and began to gesticulate: “Comrade, please. There, one minute, please, a photograph.” I looked at him, half attracted, half repelled; he was blond, with an enormous round face with his small black camera dangling over a checked shirt. 

Aunt Satchie’s house is Victorian, which means it’s like a church exploded and got put back together in a slapdash, with little domes and steeples.

He feels like he’ll never desire anything again, except sleep, and to be rid of this smell.

Pushed from its hidden end, a sofa drifted into the parking lot under my window. The pushes became feeble thrusts and then short convulsions, until, with a final spasm, the couch nudged one of the abandoned supermarket carts by the trash containers and came to a rest.

The first time we try to deliver the Gold Crown the lights are on in the house but no one lets us in. I bang on the front door and Wayne hits the back and I can hear our double drum shaking the windows