Here, after midnight on the seventh floor, room service is provided by a refugee. Her name—unlikely consonants, and then too many vowels—is printed on an apron tag. Her face is fiery, peppered by the many sweets she sucks from “late till six” as she sits on her hard chair at what the waiters call the Bus Station. It is her job to collect the ordered trays of food and drink from the service hatch and take them down the corridors—now reeking of cigars, cheap scent and cannabis, and far from silent with the clatterings of one-night stands and thoughtless television sets and arguments—to restless, needy men who ought to be in bed asleep. A man, awake beyond midnight, is unpredictable.

At midnight, Harper exits the dining room of the Old Faithful Inn and greets the distant geysers with a loud, resonant fart-take that, all ye fire-breathing monsters!-then breaks into a run across the steamy

In the mornings, Edwin walks down the Sixteenth Street Mall to Larimer Street and lingers in the natural skin-care shop on the corner. Around ten, ten-thirty the shop is filled up: people drink protein

Each day I walk to the Polo Club while my wife is at work and my children at school. I have my lunch at the club, a little wine, and I walk home. I don’t work anymore; I worked long enough, and very hard.

Early one Saturday morning, Alan “Chester” McChester stood on the marbled concourse of London’s Victoria Station reading the newly expanded Vim section of The Daily Continent. Overhead

The command nodule was the first component of our space capsule to be finished and, when Scotty debuted it, we drank Mooseheads all the way around. Our isolated Arctic facility may not have been the

Around midnight she heard a key in the lock while she was doing the dishes; she thought it was her son Clay come home early, or her husband Jake forgot his umbrella

On Wednesdays wear a skirt. A skirt is better for dancing. After school, remember not to take the bus. Go to McDonald's instead. Order the fries. Don't even bother trying to sit with Patricia and Cara. Instead, try to sit with Sasha and Toni Sue.

It was the tunnel—its imminence—that all of them were contemplating that afternoon on the train, each in a different way; the tunnel, at nine miles the longest in the world, slicing under the gelid landscape

When students here can’t stand another minute they get drunk and hurl themselves off the top floor of the Gehring Building, the shortest building on campus. The windows were tamper-proofed in August