My wife says it would be nice to win the lottery because then we could pay off the second mortgage, and I tell her that the odds she’s counting on for that are the same ones that malice it unlikely that she’ll be incinerated by a meteor on the way to work or even get hit by a bus or fall on the third rail and get fricasseed, all of which is perfectly possible, but statistics say it’s unlikely so why doesn’t she just relax. 

Wachtmann glared at the parrot and tried to recapture the chords he had seen in his dream. He kicked off his blankets. The cloth had slipped from the top of the cage and hung down like a tongue. Beckmesser was rattling his throat and adjusting his wings. His right eye was completely closed now.

No one wanted to notice a road, a potato, a banana, a mother. If they didn’t notice it, it meant it was working. 

The picnic was to be held at the hospital farm. The farm was a mile or two from the red brick buildings on the hospital grounds. There was a dairy, and a barn for the cows. And in this barn, in another section, the draft horses were stabled. 

The new tenant of the old Thomas place sat in the patio and looked at the queen’s wreath boiling over the aged but not crumbling wall. The Thomas place was on a side street in Manacle, Arizona, and the wall protected it from and insulated it against the business of the town.

One of the best books I never wrote was one to cash in on the millennium. I did get as far as the title: The Two Meets the Three Zeros (Uptown).

She stuffed fistfuls of her underwear into trash bags while the Detroit city bailiff leaned against the wall and fiddled with his phone.

I did almost nothing on my first day as Idi Amin’s doctor. I had just come in from one of the western provinces, where I’d worked in a bush surgery. 

ELENA, 10 POINT:     This typeface—conceived of by independent typographer Leopold Shunt, as the moon set on the final night of his wife's life—disintegrates over time. The more a word is used, the more

It might have all begun days or weeks before that morning in early summer when the cigarette and the newspaper vendors at the train station reported that the soldiers were coming home.