“They did not even have to clean off his face to know that the dead man was a stranger. The village was made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses that had stone courtyards with no flowers and which were spread about on the end of a desert-like cape. There was so little land that mothers always went about with the fear that the wind would carry off their children and the few dead that the years had caused among them had to be thrown off the cliffs. But the sea was calm and bountiful and all the men fitted into seven boats. So when they found the drowned man they simply had to look at one another to see that they were all there.”

“Okay, there were a lot of uncomfortable conversations a person had to have in their life. When they broke up with someone, for one. When they fucked up and had to admit they were wrong, for another. But talking to a dude who had his balls cut off about his balls being cut off beat them all.”

“That evening, as he got ready for bed, he heard his mother and father talking in their bedroom, and that was how he learned that Billy had been naked when he was discovered and that the police had arrested a man who lived with his mother in a clean little house not far from where the body was found. David knew from the way they were talking that something very bad had happened to Billy before he died, something to do with the man from the clean little house....Now, in another bedroom, he thought of Jonathan Tulvey and Anna, and wondered if a man from a clean little house, a man who lived with his mother and kept sweets in his pockets, had made them go down with him to the railroad tracks.And there, in the darkness, he had played with them, in his way.”

“The sea looked as if it had been licked clean, blue and clear and smooth, and there were a few woolly little clouds in the sky. Legend said that these clouds were sheep who had simply wandered over the cliff tops one day, special sheep who now went on grazing in the sky and were never shorn. In any case, they were a good sign.”

“And this was perhaps the first time in my life that death occurred to me as a reality. I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it—it, the physical act. I had thought of suicide when I was much younger, as, possibly, we all have, but then it would have been for revenge, it would have been my way of informing the world how awfully it had made me suffer. But the silence of the evening, as I wandered home, had nothing to do with that storm, that far off boy. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine.”

“The hanging gate, of something like trelliswork, was propped on a pole, and he could see that the house was tiny and flimsy. He felt a little sorry for the occupants of such a place--and then asked himself who in this world had a temporary shelter.[Anonymous, Kokinshuu 987:Where in all this world shall I call home?A temporary shelter is my home.]A hut, a jeweled pavilion, they were the same. A pleasantly green vine was climbing a board wall. The white flowers, he said to himself, had a rather self-satisfied look about them.'I needs must ask the lady far yonder," he said, as if to himself.[Anonymous, Kokinshuu 1007:I needs must ask the lady far yonderWhat flower it is off there that blooms so white.]An attendant came up, bowing deeply. "The white flowers far off yonder are known as 'evening faces," he said. "A very human sort of name--and what a shabby place they have picked to bloom in."It was as the man said. The neighborhood was a poor one, chiefly of small houses. Some were leaning precariously, and there were "evening faces" at the sagging eaves.A hapless sort of flower. Pick one off for me, will you?"The man went inside the raised gate and broke off a flower. A pretty little girl in long, unlined yellow trousers of raw silk came out through a sliding door that seemed too good for the surroundings. Beckoning to the man, she handed him a heavily scented white fan.Put it on this. It isn't much of a fan, but then it isn't much of a flower either.”