The mist was like cotton. Wrapped in it they gathered up the mushrooms: delicate, plump, velvet, born of a shower perhaps, or a miracle that drew from the earth these cowls, these shapes of mysterious life compounded of tiny whitened folds.

Trudy threw a jug across the room. It didn’t reach the opposite wall, it didn’t hurt anybody, it didn’t even break. This was the jug without a handle, cement-colored, with brown streaks in it, rough as sandpaper

“You can write about your parents when they're gone, but your children are still going to be here, and you're going to want them to come and visit you in the nursing home.”

Nakata visited the vacant lot for several days. One morning it rained heavily, so he spent the day doing simple woodwork in his room, but apart from that he bided his time seated in the weeds 

Two months ago, when I first arrived in this township just short of the border, I resolved to guard my eyes, and I could not think of going on with this piece of writing unless I were to explain how I came by that odd expression.

It had started to rain outside. The water was sliding like lace curtains, one over the other, down his window as if to stop him from seeing out. But each curtain only blurred the long driveway and the three cars that were parked in front kept running all together like his watercolors on folded paper. 

Meself and Chips were down the Blind Ref one night when this young head-the-ball walks in. A young lad he was, a right looking head-the-ball. “Ay ay,” says Chips, sucking the stout out of his mustache. 

There’s no end to the woes that mothers face come summer vacation.

According to the weather forecast, the next day was to be sunny, warm, decidedly springlike. At times like this, though, one never knew, because on the eve of ­ official holidays the forecasts were always falsified. 

I never knew her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance.