The flags of the boats in the bay whipped in the wind and the gulls wheeled for snapshots and the sound of bicycle bells fell through the leaves of the chestnut trees and down the cobbled streets, and, on warm afternoons, on the porch of her summer home, Mrs. Harlan Case would often be heard to say, “I would have sown them like beautiful flowers,” for she had wanted many children.

Willie and Liberty broke into a house on Crab Key and lived there for a week. Crab Key was tiny and exclusive, belonging to an association which had armed security patrol. The houses on Crab Key were owned by people so wealthy that they were hardly ever there. They were elsewhere.

The funeral of Anne’s son Harry had not gone smoothly. Other burials were taking place at the same hour, including that of a popular singer several hundred yards away whose mourner fans carried on loudly under a lurid, striped tent. Still more fans pressed against the cemetery’s wrought iron gates screaming and eating potato chips. 

What is Miss Treece’s trouble, according to a popular notion?

Walter got the silk pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, one white—an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom, they made Tim cry.

Every morning when she woke up, she saw the flame and felt the fire—curling around her lashes, creeping up her thighs, blossoming flowers of pink upon her flesh. Clutching stiff lace against her dangling breasts, pressing her heels into the bedpost, she would scream, her singed cheek wrinkling into itself. 

The yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually.

I pitched through the lobby door and then, as I caught my breath, stood looking back at the storm. It was bad out there. The city had been reduced to dim outlines and floating lights; snow moved down Nineteenth Street in waves. I beat it from my hat and coat, knocked my boots together. Under those high ceilings, each sound reverberated. Only the emergency lights were on, there was no one at the front desk, all the elevators in the bank sat open and waiting. And in a fit of hope, I thought there might not be, in all the building, even one other soul.

Though I hadn’t hit that button, the elevator stopped on nine: silence, nothing but cubicles in the faint light of an alarm panel. When the doors slid open again on fourteen I saw Manny Mintauro, our security guard, like a stone slab behind his podium. Half his face was in shadow. My heart fell at the sight of him.

“Sup, bro,” he said, deep and grave.  

The elevator doors closed behind me. “Hey, Manny.” Snow dropped from my jeans onto the carpet. “Thought it might just be me today.

Liberty had never cared for Halloween. The night gave the false hope that when one was summoned to the door by a stranger’s knock, one’s most horrible fears could be realized by the appearance of ghosts, bats, ambulatory corpses, and the headless hounds of hell.

I was going to say that this letter is difficult to write, but then you would wonder why I am writing it, so I will not make it easy for me by saying that it is difficult, but simply go ahead, if I can.