“In a Cafe"I watched a man in a cafe fold a slice of bread as if he were folding a birth certificate or looking at the photograph of a dead lover.”

“Alas, Measured Perfectly"Saturday, August 25, 1888. 5:20 P.M.is the name of a photograph of twoold women in a front yard, besidea white house. One of the women issitting in a chair with a dog in herlap. The other woman is looking atsome flowers. Perhaps the women arehappy, but then it is Saturday, August25, 1888. 5:21 P.M., and all over.”

“I will be very careful the next time I fall in love, she told herself. Also, she had made a promise to herself that she intended on keeping. She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around the house that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom.”

“If you will die for me,I will die for youand our graves will be like two lovers washingtheir clothes togetherin a laundromatIf you will bring the soapI will bring the bleach.”

“There was something dead in my heart.I tried to figure out what it was by the strength of the smell. I knew that it was not a lion or a sheep or a dog. Using logical deduction, I came to the conclusion that it was a mouse.I had a dead mouse in my heart.”

“The old woman had an old dog, but he hardly counted any more. He was so old that he looked like a stuffed dog. Once I took him for a walk down to the store. It was just like taking a stuffed dog for a walk. I tied him up to a stuffed fire hydrant and he pissed on it, but it was only stuffed piss.”

“I had become so quiet and so small in the grass by the pond that I was barely noticeable, hardly there. I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy-tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity. Anyway, I just kept getting smaller and smaller beside the pond, more and more unnoticed in the darkening summer grass until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then.”