On our first date, he bought me a taco, talked at length about the ancients’ theories of light, how it streams at angles to align events in space and time, that it is the source of all information, determines every outcome, how we can reflect it to summon aliens using mirrored bowls of water.

Vivian spends most of the afternoon naked and strapped to the giant ottoman in the interior decorator’s office in Bethesda. When he finally unties her, the sun is low and she’s shaky and exhausted. 

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.