Mr. Field, a concert pianist, splinters his wrist in a train crash and uses his compensation pay-out to buy a house he has seen only in photographs—a replica of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye on a stretch of coast outside Cape Town. 

She would remember everything, out of the blue and in full detail. She would see the jade ring wrapped around her ring finger and, immediately, she would see the other jade ring. 

My wife, Gin, once knocked gently on my head, as if it were a door. “Hello,” she kept saying. “Hello. Who’s in there?” She and our therapist, Dr. Sherby, laughed a little about this, so I did, too.

Lai was hidden in the middle of forests when the Vai people found it. There was evidence of earlier townsmen there, as ends of stoneware and crushed diamonds were found scattered on hilltops in the unexpected company of domestic cats. 

Somehow, they were swimming in the canals. Later this part seemed hazy, but somehow they were all there: Lila, her little boy, and James, a former student. 

Autumn arrived with a general spray of autumn color. It wasn’t winter yet, but it would be; there was a hint in the air of the cold to follow. 

The moist cheese on his blue-and-white porcelain, the Pinot.

I had been told that the interviewer was waiting for me outside in the hotel garden. The ­muffled oceanic roar of traffic rose steadily from the nearby road. 

In the crucible of our family my sister burned like molten steel. Once I saw her arms outspread her legs hanging limp and useless wet saliva dripping from her tongue.

This would have been her favorite season in the Allegheny woods. The shadows of the trees were rickety, and the wind had sap in its scent. But last week, Ty had left; now one day decayed into the next.