PLEASE IMAGINE AN EXPLOSION ON A SHIP

A paretic named Perkins sat askew on his broken wheel chair. He arranged his lips.

You pithyathed thon of a bidth!” he shouted.

One summer evening at about midnight a man wearing eye-glasses and a light-blue shirt made his way through the crowded lobby of a movie theater and stepped outside with a look of dismay. The marquee was hung with a crackling curtain of rain. 

Marimba had beautiful teeth. They were not especially good teeth, or strong, but they were well-honed —small, white was the white keys on a piano, and lewd as the rosewood keys, come to think of it, on a marimba.

When she smiled, her front teeth rested on her lower lip,and she felt the angle, the bevelling, identical tooth to tooth.

It’s been two days since the mugging.

The oval face of the mugger rises higher and bobs in what looks like moonlight. Only it’s raining.

Saturday morning at the zoo, facing the lions’ cage, overcast sky and a light breeze carrying the smell of peanuts and animal dung, the peacocks making their stilted progress across the sidewalks. I was standing in front of the gorge separating the human viewers from the lions. The lions weren’t caged, exactly; they just weren’t free to go.

Liz woke up at three A.M., when she recognized Danny’s car rumbling into the driveway. It had a hole in the muffler. Then she heard the car turn around and speed down the street. 

The moment I hated most at Thurston’s came toward the end of Winston Fiefs tribute. I had tried to talk Margot out of having the service at Thurston’s at all. Moose didn’t belong in one of those fashionable horror shows at James W. Thurston’s, “The Memorial Chapel,” which are treated in the next day’s Times like Met openings or muscular dystrophy balls at the Waldorf.

Victor Franks, because he worked nights, and perhaps because his metabolism, as his ex-wife once suggested, was slower than average, did not function very well in the morning. He was a man who lacked the few simple habits that breed contentment. 

Karen was twenty-six. She had been engaged twice, married once. Her husband had run away with another woman after only six months. It still made her angry when she thought about it, which was not often.

It’s 1976. The sky is low and full of clouds. The grey clouds are bulbous and wrinkled and shiny. The sky looks cerebral. Under the sky is a field, in the wind. A pale highway runs beside the field. Lots of cars go by. One of the cars stops by the side of the highway.