The alarm buzzed and Mary awoke with a start. It was 5:30, a dark winter morning. Mary was fast and well organized. Everything was planned so she could get to the bus stop by 6 a.m.

A car horn sounded a few blocks away and seemed to linger a moment in the humid night air. As if out of no where, a weather-beaten low rider rounded the corner with a screech...

Cheryl roughly tweaked her nose with a thumb and finger, sniffed deliberately and snapped her head up with a shake. I’m not going to cry all the way to work. Looking out of the city bus window, she could see the sun just beginning its assent, caught like film frames between the skyscrapers, a bloody yolk already sizzling and stewing in the hot summer morning.

In a few minutes, she knew the pain would feel like a saber piercing through her right eye and out through the back of her head. Joan cursed the inventor of childproof bottle caps as she fumbled with a family-size canister of ibuprofen. When she suffered these strange migraines, even the simplest of tasks was impossible. It was only a matter of time before she blacked out.

Salbenblatt had had something to drink and didn’t want to make a noise. He bolted the door of the flat and checked the gas tap, as he did every evening; he heard the siren of a car down in the street, and then, behind the opened door, his wife who had woken with a fright.

In the middle of that summer, when there had been no rain for weeks, and the forest was tinder dry, and the winds were high, a sheepherder built a cooking fire on the slope of Bear Sign Mountain.

The US entered World War II, and Hoke Inc. (a company on Eagle Avenue in the Bronx where I was employed as a machinist, manufacturing small torches for use in the jewelry industry), changed its production to flamethrowers. Flamethrowers shot a gasoline mixture more than one hundred feet and then ignited it, burning everything it doused. It was a horrible weapon, but its justification was that this was a war against fascism.

Vida cringed at the thought of “wearing” Hank again, but he was never late. As 2 p.m. drew near, she felt the usual uneasiness twisting her abdomen. Sharing his energy left her feeling spent and infected. His perversions were a rancid fog that lingered on her mind.

After a morning of pounding the pavements in search of a job, answering Want-Ads for any kind of dirty, ill-paid work, available, a guy feels that he’s just about done-up, and is entitled to a rest. There’s no point in plugging at it any longer: after eleven o’clock there’s nothing doing.

A shrill familiar sound woke Chuck ruthlessly from a pleasant dream. It was one of those great reveries where he was entertaining a bevy of ladies around the water fountain at work with an amusing story.

Searching without map or compass for the tracks of his platoon that led behind the Soviet front lines, Lechner lost his way in the white night in which harmless snowdrifts.

It all looked like the fragments of a shattered dream—the dusk, the dark indigo sky, and the way the airport mini-bus drove them through an endless road with the speed of light.

It was mid-afternoon in Tsimshatsui. It was 1976 and I was an air courier, staying in the Astor Hotel in the less expensive tourist section of Hong Kong, then still a British colony. The Astor was known in Chinese as "Langung Chowdin" or "White Palace Hotel."

We sat in two rows facing each other in a black van. We were twelve men, six on each side. The bearded guard covered our eyes with large scarves....

I gave up college to go strike it rich in the software industry by writing software for this startup company, that like many software companies of its kind, promised endless streams of money and happiness in exchange for my ‘20s. Back then, it all seemed like a good idea.