“Hats off, gentlemen. Hats off in deference”: this was his frantic call, erupting out of the oppressive summer night as though it were heat thunder roiling forth from the past.

Old Man William Brown at Half Way Creek, he liked the way I went about my business. He liked my style and saw some future for me so he took a down payment on a wornout schooner. 

The same day that he canceled all his newspaper and magazine subscriptions, Mr. Christopher deveined a pound of jumbo shrimp by hand. 

Mrs. Rachelina’s property was typical of the crumbling Latin aristocracies. A somewhat jumbled garden, unkempt, but practical—they ate the fruit—to the east of a nineteenth-century house which was large and mostly empty. 

There are grape leaves, like a crown, on her head. Grapes hang in her hair, and in her hands she holds the green vines. She dances with both arms in the air. On her smallest toe she wears a ring of pink shell.

He put his foot on the rusted railway line among the nettles, thistles and cacti. In this way he managed to see over the rotted ends of the planks that had been part of the derelict station platform, and into the dark earth of the small garden shaded by the sycamore.

They meet, without touching, at the edge of two stories, his unfolding, hers under revision, or perhaps hers rising, his falling, brushing past one another with no more contact than that made by two empty coats in a restaurant cloakroom

Like all prolonged natural disasters, the Dakota dust bowl bred superstition. Real estate changed hands by the bushel.The government and railroad boosters had told dirt-poor eastern farmers that

Walter got the silk pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, one white—an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom, they made Tim cry.

There’s a hill east of the village, not as tall as others, but I can see every road worth seeing. Someone planted tulips around a maple up there. I don’t know why—maybe a family buried a dead pet