Men together bullying, boasting, bragging, buddying up, being belligerent, being bureaucratic, having a blast at banquets and booze-ups, bearing briefcases, breaking promises, and brokering big-shot business deals.
Androusha Mille—the great-great-grandson, by the way, of the very same General Evgeny Karlovich Miller, head of the Russian All-General Military union, whom Chekists rubbed out in Paris in 1937
Could two people stay in love, when one had injured the other in such a permanent and visible way?
Maybe it’s surrender to Mary I want, I said. A feminine divine.
An ad hoc group of ten longtime and tentative friends rents a house on the Spanish island of Formentera.
Cyparis the Lilliputian came at noon out of the dust clouds of the coastal road, out of the year’s first cold dust. As in every year before, Cyparis drove along the shore, two duns harnessed to his covered wagon, and with his whip he traced menacing, mad figures in the air, screaming at the people of Tomi the names of heroes and beautiful women.
I SELF PORTRAIT WITH BAY, 1909. Water colour and oil. The National Gallery. Leaves? Body of water? Scent? Misspelled potentate? He is now 137 years old, or 85. Decades fall like wooden
“We never really liked that pond in the garden. At times it was choked with a sort of weed, which, if you pulled one thread, gleefully unravelled until you had an empty basin before you and the whole of the pond in a soaking heap at your side.
The messenger’s knuckles were up to bang the door again when I opened it. He held out the damp telegram in the swirling snow, looked over my shoulder at the guests moving in the kitchen doorway, the back of a woman
When Cyphus looked up from his raking and saw the black park ranger with his Smokey the Bear hat and his park service flashlight hip-mounted, a little cockily
Alice read John Mark’s letter, her eyes narrowed, as I paced our tiny apartment. The envelope contained in-structions for retrieving two sets of human remains from the University of Florida. I sometimes worked for John Mark, the director of the Milwaukee Public Museum, in exchange for modest paychecks and access to the museum’s research collection. I often did the jobs the museum interns refused to do, like retrieving artifacts originally accessioned by the MPM from other institutions and bringing them back to Milwaukee. I hadn’t taken one of these jobs since before Tess was born, afraid to leave her or Alice, but we were so poor we had begun to eat only the casseroles Alice’s mother sent over in weekly batches.