This was a sentence to be analyzed by students of logic or ontology.
"Yes, it's him, it's me."
"Make up your mind," she whispered.
It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man to tell him that he is at the end of his nature, or that there is no further state to come.
Are you going to tell me that he drives this way only when he speaks this language?
She looked into the options below the screen and put her finger to the inch-square site marked OFF. Nothing happened.
Then I leaned toward the screen and hit the OFF site. Nothing happened.
We were quiet for a time and I hit the oFF site and then Emma hit it and I hit it again.
Two young women crossed at the light, heads shaved, and the man and woman on the screen spoke in faraway tones about a new surge of Arctic melt and we waited for footage of some kind, amateur video or network helicopter, but they changed the subject and I hit the OFF site and they were still there and then Emma hit it and I hit it again, calmly, and we resigned ourselves to the deadly sedative tenor of picture and sound.
It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.
I maintained reasonably, to myself, that this procedure should have been performed by the bank.
Here we are, the woman smart, determined, not detached so much as measuring every occasion, including this one, brown hair swept back, a face that is not interested in being pretty, and this gives her a quality I can't quite name, a kind of undividedness.
A son or daughter who travels at a wayward angle must seem a penalty the parent must bear—but for what crime?
Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.
On the street, going nowhere special, I check my wallet and keys, I check the zipper on my pants to make sure that it's fastened securely from beltline to crotch or vice versa.
The relief is not commensurate with the fear.
The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.