artemis is but a mincing fawn:/ no sacred bitches need i in my ranks,/ nor hunting dogs to tear a man apart/ when i have teeth enough to bruise fine flanks.

I built the fence myself, strong and high and aesthetically pleasing. It was high enough to provide privacy on both sides, but from my bedroom balcony I could see everything. More than I wanted to see.

He’d tossed and turned all night, pondering what to do, afraid she was living alone. He’d decided to email her two words: “Love you” and signed it “Scary Sal,” as she’d always seemed so afraid of him.

Both his parents saved their pent up Puritan pasts to fill his ears with brimstone clichés. "Idle time is the devil's playground", he would tell me, scrunching up his face, stuffing it full of meat lovers pizza.

I don’t personally know any models—let alone any supermodels—at this point in my life but some years back my father, who was working for the Woolite Corporation, was in charge of hiring models for them.

All were part of the household of Court Astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) who lost his nose in a duel as a student and went through life thereafter wearing a gold prosthetic one instead and who met and fell in love with a commoner who bore him eigh

We lived across, the street, across North Govenor, from a pretty art student whose stripper name was Jan the Blonde Bombshell.

He slumped forward, drooling into his lap.

...dogs snapping at the brush as it spins this way, that way, eluding the slavering jaws by a hairs breadth. The fox twists and rolls, tries every trick, every last desperate one.

The fish would need a name, but she didn’t know how to tell if it was a boy or a girl. Did fish have penises?

Only scotch and cheap champagne/ retain their reliable flavors.

I concluded that Parisian sexuality must be partially indebted to the cricket or grasshopper. The entrance to their flat was a wood door scarred by scriptures common to places frequented by people who have not yet made their mark on the world.

Paul had come to Hawaii, like many young haoles from the mainland, to party. Partying proved to be lucrative for him. By early October 1982 he had done well for himself in Hawaii, living in a country house with sprawling lawns that held back the jungle foliage…

On Saturdays, we pull out big white poster boards, magic markers, and draw babies.

He was a sushi chef, and he would spend hours in their kitchen practicing his knife skills, and the speed with which he can put that there and this in that and so on; and she would see him on the floor most mornings, still wearing that dirty, tattered ban