For his first thirty-five years, Joseph Saleeby's mother makes his bed and each of his meals; every morning she makes him read a column of the English dictionary, selected at random, before he is allowed

Much later on, long after Judgment Day, we remembered that a man had once passed through here and then returned, still living, to the world. Across the lightning and malefic smoke of Hell the news

In their early fifties Agnes gave a party that David remembered almost in its entirety. He wasn’t sure why. At the center of the evening was the surprise appearance of an old friend of Agnes—a pianist named Cassie, who’d made the drive out to the end of the island by herself. David 

Ever since his return from hell he dreamed of paradise. The idea struck him suddenly one afternoon at the office. But he put it off in haste trying to concentrate on the work at hand. The thought popped

 Coach Gica tended to us goalies specially, he made us show up at every practice an hour early and mainly had us do speed drills, plus we had to jump a lot and dive, jump and dive, jump and dive, and he had 

Szabi and I figured out pretty fast that chalk doesn’t give you a fever at all, that it’s just a legend, because we each ate one and a half pieces of chalk and nothing happened to us, we even tried the 

Olgi says she’s going to take me somewhere and show me something I’ve never seen before. We walk through a door into an inner courtyard, then from there into another one, then into a third one, where there is a wire fence. Olgi knows where the fence can be lifted, she picks it up, holds it, I slip through, then I hold it up while she slips through the fence.

I am so tired. So very tired that I started writing this letter all wrong. Haven’t been any too well and hot weather coming on. I have a very sore thumb on my right hand. But I never give up my work. I never have gotten all my housecleaning done as yet but except to maby before long.

John and Sylvia fell asleep watching the movie and so they never learned the secret of Rebecca. 

Juanita Creehan was a waitress in a piano bar near Camp Pendleton, California. She had been a widow for twelve years, and her most intense memory of her marriage was an imagined one: Patrick’s death in