David works for the city, the water division. He spends his days driving around Pine, Oregon, in a pumpkin-orange Chevy Astrovan. He’s done the math: every day, on average, he puts a hundred and fifty

You are sitting, naked from the waist up, wearing only pajama bottoms, in your garret, on the narrow bench that serves as your bed, with a book. Raymond Aron’s Eighteen Lectures on Industrial Society

At first the darkness sometimes forms the vague outline of an ace of spades: from a point in front of you two lines recede, diverge and, after tracing a vast curve, turn back towards you.

“Daogiri,” said Abdullah, their chauffeur-guide, gesturing freely, “is an impregnable fortress. Absolutely. The sides are so steep and smooth that an ant could not climb them —nor even a snake.”

From a mile’s distance, where Stanley Bendana, rounding out a two-year stint in the Peace Corps with a tour of South India, and Mrs. Majumdar had stopped on the roadside for a panoramic view, the citadel had looked impressive enough: a cone of gray rock with a scarped waist that rose sheer from the flat, brown Deccan plateau.

My new boy friend is named Alexander. He is a dumpling of a man. We have reached the point in our relationship where we have begun to speak our histories.

To them he was simply “the old man” and they had no other name for him: he was so ancient that they had forgotten what he had once been called and knew nothing of his origins; there was some debate even as to whether he truly belonged to the tribe. Yet when they took me out to meet him, they showed him to me with pride: he was theirs now and was something to exhibit to visitors; he cost virtually nothing to keep in food and shelter and could easily be carried with them once the waterhole dried up and they had to move on. Besides, he looked after their locusts.

Two sisters lived together in a two-room apartment. They were very poor. For lunch, they usually had a boiled potato; for breakfast, a slice of bread with a glass of hot water. 

Hal Parker runs out to his wife’s hydrangea bushes. He’s trying to scare away the neighbor’s black Lab, Major. Hal claps his hands in front of him and shouts, but Major’s already peeing on the bush. It seems to Hal that lately the dog just won’t stay in his pen. Hal has watched him dig holes under it and even seen him climb over it once or twice.

Hal looks next door. His neighbor Corey Lane’s Camaro is in the yard. He decides to tell Corey about his dog. As he knocks on the door and waits, Hal looks over the front of the house and thinks he should have talked to Corey about Major weeks ago. He also thinks the bricks need to be washed and the shutters need to be repainted. He knocks again and hears the floorboards creak on the other side of the door. Major is back at the hydrangeas.

His mother’s face had not always looked so round. He could remember it pale and maidenly, when the cheekbones showed and when it was soft but not fleshy and relatively unpolluted by woe. Mrs. Blodgette wasn’t forty yet. 

At nine in the morning, when all was fresh, the starched uniforms of the nurses bustled more briskly, their curious caps sat more pertly, and the illusion of sanitation and good cheer bloomed on the fifth floor of the Private Pavilion more brightly than at any hour of the day.