The next morning it was cold in the apartment. She sat on the edge of the bed, wrapped in an old plaid bathrobe and warmed her clothes over the electric heater. He was still asleep. 

It happens like this. He sets out in the afternoon on the track that has been shown to him and soon he leaves the little town behind. In an hour or so he is among low hills covered by olive trees and grey stones

Even before their departure, when he goes to meet her flight from Cape Town, he knows he’s in trouble. He last saw her a month ago and she was in a bad way then, but look at her now. 

No particular intention brings him to Zimbabwe, all those years ago. He simply decides one morning to leave and gets on a bus that same night. He has it in mind to travel around for two weeks and then go back.

When a place is too beautiful, there will be repercussions. Such places attract disruptions, encroachments, noxious pollutants of sound and deed.

A young woman gets on a small feeder plane in Peoria, a real old-timey number, a DC something, the aisle so steep that she has to grab on to the seats and pull her way up. The lights on the wall are pale yellow. “Smoking or no smoking?” The stewardess, flight attendant that is, laughs, because there is only one other passenger on the plane, a big bald-headed man. 

In the upper berth was a woman who began at about eight o’clock to weep softly. At first Mary did not find this troublesome. In fact, the weeping, which never verged on the hysterical or distraught, was

I saw Margarito Duarte, after twenty-two years, on one of the narrow secret streets in Trastevere, and at first I had trouble recognizing him because he spoke halting Spanish and had the appearance of an old Roman.

Around midnight she heard a key in the lock while she was doing the dishes; she thought it was her son Clay come home early, or her husband Jake forgot his umbrella

From the small, flat, hot, treeless, asphalted valley town of Tracy, California—split by a six-lane highway and surrounded by fields of sugar beets, alfalfa, and tomatoes—an enormous pink car one day departed by the eastern end without previously entering by the western end, this car being the property of a permanent resident, Ernest Grubb, nineteen, who was in turn the property of a finance company.