“A shibboleth is a test—a way to separate da wheat from da chaff that's as old as the Bible, but as new as the latest trend in men's fashions,” Gus says.

I stomped up the steps clearing my shoes of snow. I was wearing my Rooskie fur hat with the ear flaps, and I kept it on when I went inside.

-Love is a rushing of blood

The cataclysm of all those photons/ mad to be a part of you

Summer nights in Boston, old cast iron streetlights.

He finished the omelet and started in on the short stack. He drowned the cakes in syrup. -Never can have enough syrup.

She overcomes herself on the day of the spectacle, clown paint, unmoving amid a rumble of trains and screens, video logs and snapshots, live blogs from phones wet with lotion. This is Tokyo. Facial masks. Bare flaking paint in streams. Stardust.

Jaume jumped up from the bar, a wide smile across his face. He hugged his old friend and planted a kiss on his wife's cheeks. He was buzzing from the chance encounter, marveling how life had brought them together after all these years. There had to be a r

don't look at me honey, I fell on the table, my hair is on fire, my heart is unstable

Over the stained fence the spectres flew and that is where the rain was turning colder and colder in the time when the trees had become mostly bare.

They blew in the doorway of the café at the French Hotel like two sparrows chasing each other. Their wings down in the dust, unheeding any danger in their hunger for each other. I knew the man who was about to become her husband, so maybe this was her las

in late fall, Rome, sans wind, sans rancor, sans sand or rain, sans hate ...

“There goes that slut Kerri Stanton,” the immense woman behind the counter chuckled to her patron. “Who the hell does she think she is?”

If this is trouble, please call someone else.

“Now we lay you in your grave There was no way you could be saved You hate our lord Jesus and he can tell Which is why you will burn in hell.”