Mo Dean woke up sober. And tired. Tired of life, of soiled pants, rash, vomit, and whiskey sweat. Tired of holes in his pockets and blisters on his feet, of hanging signs asking for dimes and getting only pennies. And most of all, tired of the police.

Then he took the tune out to Ben Clarone land. The horn was beautiful, if leaky. His fingers flew over the keys.

I figure maybe I’m mostly alone; they are all running down staircases or falling down fire escapes, some of them naked, some of them with towels, mostly probably naked though.

You are an heiress to drunks. The statues of your forefathers stagger, memorialized by gravity, their faces half-lit eternally, as they reach into refrigerators for another something to keep away the cold empty.

It was by the well on one cold early spring morning

Sitting in the upper last row of Wyatt Hall, Matt stretched his long legs under the fold-up desk top. He looked down past his fellow students' heads to barely catch something Dr. Mock had said. . . .

The artist leans back in his chair, smoking a cigarette after lunch, looking away from the table toward the right He is dressed in white, and he's practically stretched out his entire length, to relax after rowing the boat all morning. Sunlight

My little friend is no bigger than a minute. An even five feet tall, if that.

Cat's ass was on fire. The roof was scorching hot. Her clothes were in a pile by the door that led to the roof. She was sitting next to the ventilation duct, her hands outstretched behind her, her knees bent before her. Jim was standing in front of…

"Penning a slight of tongue well versed or worse, a salacious lie..."

What becomes the identity of a woman who has been denied all her rights and thrown into a mental institution?

Sleep never fades away quickly. It has to be shaken off, layer by layer, before reality can reach you. That is the way every morning works for me. There are some days when I will sit at the edge of my bed for almost an hour, shedding remnants of dreams

A shot in the dark and everything goes black. It's as if the story never happened.

Little stuff at first: mistaking their dog for a cat, attempting to start the car with a bar of soap, or using a newspaper to dry the dishes. Lately, he’d been slipping: calling her by his mother’s name during sex, berating his boss for lackluster profit

Mr. Blumberg and I sat side by side on a small couch in the family room. He was watching a football game on TV.