Mitch bit into another slice of pizza and took a guess at who would win the BBQ Pitmasters episode he was watching. The judges awarded the grand prize to a team from Georgia. Mitch muttered, “I knew it.” He hoisted himself off of the sofa and headed toward the kitchen for another beer. He was thirty-five years old, nearly 300 pounds with a heart condition, single, friendless, and hostile toward
“Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” Ray dutifully reminded himself as he watched his left shoe, and then his right shoe, pass each other on the sidewalk below, looking from his vantage point like compact autos negotiating a tiny two-lane road. If one could even call it that, given a buckling surface strewn with cigarette butts and used tissue papers and rubble – were it a road, heaven
It had been pouring rain all morning at Windansea Beach on the San Diego coastline. Cynthia Perez stood under a thatched hut of desiccating King Palm fronds that stood just twenty yards from the water near a group of smooth, caramel-colored rock formations. Perfect A-frame waves broke there all day long, converging into one sharp point. These were thick, heavy waves that the local surfers appreciated. But on this day,
But if one sat down among the rushes and watched the pool—pools have some curious fascination, one knows not what—the red and black letters and the white paper seemed to lie very thinly on the surface, while beneath went on some profound under-water life like the brooding, the ruminating of a mind. Many, many people must have come there alone, from time to time, from age to age, dropping their
One night, Gordon Baker dreamed he was standing in his pajamas on the sloping roof of the Williams’ house and staring at the stars. He awoke to actually find himself sliding off the edge of the Williams’ roof. On his way over the edge, he grabbed the rain gutter, which separated from the house but broke Gordon’s fall and allowed him to land gently on the yard. Gordon sprinted three
London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle,
