My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn’t even fold his umbrella. Véra licked his stamps for him.

Oneba tells of an occasion which found him riding the trench, pedaling himself, in his fabulous little pedalcar. As he went along, so the story goes, he was set upon by a band oftrochilics, their

Ajegunle Joe spent the evening reading the letters from the few subscribers he had left. Without a single exception they called him a fraud and demanded back their money.

She walked as if she were afraid that putting one foot down on the floor too hard would make the boards crack.

“Wait till I turn this off. Now.”

“That noise. Whatever is it?”

“The Hoover was running.”

“How’s that?”

“I said, I was running the vacuum.”

“Not that. Outside. Listen.” Rosie leaned over the banister.

“Oh, it’s the bee, dear.”

“Bee nothing. A thousand woodpeckers working on tin.”

Selim the half-wit hoarded everything—that was the story they told me my first day in waste management. Selim had lost his wife, and I guess everyone figured he took up hoarding as a way to fill the void. It started out with stuff his wife might have liked—small earrings, a tea set, owl statuettes—picked out of garbage bins. Well, Selim ended up with a house packed to the rafters with trash he thought was gold. He tucked it onto shelves and into stacks, put it in cupboards, crammed it under floorboards, couch cushions, and the mattress, until there was no space left but overhead.

The last time we had sex, it was cold out and they said a storm was coming. My wife was shivering in fear, making a list to steady herself. For a while I was trying to cross things off—candles, eight gallons of water, move things away from windows. 

Nate Zamost took that week off school. We wondered what he did those long days other than the funeral, which didn’t take more than a few hours. The Zamosts lived in one of those houses just across the fence from Foley’s Pond. Nate’s sister, Barbara—they called her Babs—slid under the chain-link and waddled down to the water.

After graduate school I hung around another year and drove a cab for Iowa City Yellow Cab. The cab was a boat, a Chevrolet Caprice wagon. I could have put a mattress in the back and lived in it.

Sunday and the beautiful and sleek and unsmiling and too good for us Mavala Shikongo is gone. Second to last single woman teacher at an all boy's boarding school so far in the veld even the baboons