It turned out that the extremely powerful bourgeoisie and
by far the greater part of the peasantry around the capital, from the rich
farmers to the white trash, was of variegated European extraction, united by
the frail bond of a language which, although often imperfectly understood, was
still held in common while the slum dwellers presented an extraordinary racial
diversity but were all distinguishable by the colour
black, for that pigmintation, to some degree, was
common to them all.
[…]
She had a slippery, ingratiating quality which was meant to disarm but somehow offended me and she loquaciously set sail on a rattling stream of nothings while the girl in the drawing room continued to play the piano exquisitely and the music echoed down a corridor into the room…She had a waxen delicacy of a plant bred in a cupboard. She did not look as if blood flowed through her veins but instead some other, less emphatic fluid infinitely less red. Her mouth was barely touched with palest pink though it had exactly the proportions of the three cherries the artmaster piles in an inverted traingle to illustrate the classic mouth and there was no tinge of any pink at all on her cheeks.
—from Angela Carter, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman
His wife had died. So he was visiting the dead wife's
relatives in
—from "Cathedral," by Raymond Carter
Once in a while take evening trips past the old unsold house you grew up in, that haunted rural crossroads two hours from where you now live. It is like Halloween: the raked, moon-lit lawn, the mammoth, tumid trees, arms and fingers raised into the starless wipe of sky like burns, cracks, map rivers. . .Look up through the windshield. In the November sky a wedge of wrens moves south, the lines of their formation, the very sides and vertices mysteriously choreographed, shifting, flowing, crossing like a skater's legs... Walk through wooded areas; there is a life there you have forgotten. The smells and sounds seem sudden, unchanged, exact, the paper crunch of the leaves, the mouldering sachet of the mud. The trees are crooked as backs, the fence posts splintered, trusting and precarious in their solid grasp of arms, the asters splindly, dry, white, havishammed (Havishammed!) by frost.
—from "How to Talk to Your Mother," by
Lorrie Moore
"Her eyebrows will lift like theater curtains."
"Your roommate looks at you, her face blank as a large Kleenex."
"Work up a vibrato you could drive a truck though."
"Try to figure out what has made your life go wrong. It is like trying to figure out what is stinking up the refrigerator. "
"You are a zoo of insecurities."
"The clink of the silverware inside the drawer, piled like bones in a mass grave."
"You see a ghost, something like a spinning statue by a shrub."
"She ages, rocks in your rocker, noiseless as wind."
"The radio station piped in from the ceiling plays slow, sad Motown; it encircles you with the desperate hopefulness of a boy at a dance. . ."
"On public transportation mothers with soft,
soapy, corduroyed seraphs glance at you, their faces dominoes of
compassion."
—some figurative language in Lorrie Moore's work
In the first go-round he'd drawn a bull he knew and got a good scald on him. He'd been in a slump for weeks, wire stretched right, but things were turning back his way. He'd come off that animal in a flying dismount, sparked a little clapping that quickly died; the watchers knew as well as he that if he burst into blames and sang an operatic aria after the whistle it would make no damn difference.
He drew o.k. bulls and rode them in the next rounds, scores in the high seventies, fixed his eyes on the outside shoulder of the welly bull that tried to drop him, then at the short-go draw he pulled Kisses, rank and salty, big as a boxcar of coal. On that one all you could do was your best and hope for a little sweet luck; if you got the luck he was money.
[…]
They climbed through the stony landscape, limestone beds eroded by wind into fantastic furniture, stale gnawed breadcrusts, tumbled bones, stacks of dirty folded blankets, bleached crab claws and dog teeth. […] The roots of his mind felt withered and punky.
[…]
Looking at her, not just her face, but up and down, eyes moving over her like an iron over a shirt and the old man in his mailman’s sweater and lopsided hat tasting his Everclear and not noticing or not caring, getting up every now and then to lurch onto the porch and water the weeds.
[…]
He traveled against curdled sky. In the last sixty miles the
snow began again. He climbed out of
The light was falling out of the day when he reached the pass, the blunt mountains lost in snow, the greasy hairpin turns ahead. He drove slowly and steadily in a low gear; he had not forgotten how to drive a winter mountain. But the wind was up again, rocking and slapping the car, blotting out all but whipping snow and he was sweating with the anxiety of keeping to the road, dizzy with altitude. Twelve more miles, sliding and buffeted, before he reached Ten Sleep where streetlights glowed in revolving circles like Van Gogh's sun.
—Annie Proulx, CloseRange:
Rocco’s father had been a medical cheese sculptor—he sculpted cheese centerpieces for medical conventions. It was a profession that required not only fine craftsmanship and an encyclopedic knowledge of cheeses, but a comprehensive understanding of human anatomy. One needed to know which cheeses by dint of their hues and textures would allow the sculptor to render an organ with maximum fidelity. Mavarti with dill, for instance, is particularly suitable for sculpting uterine lining. Mozzarella has just the right slickness and convoluted folds for the brain.”
[…]
When I arrive at the Jack LaLanne Health
Spa, there is no sign that a clandestine meeting of ultra-right-wing
intellectuals and psychics is taking place in its sauna. Yelping aerobics classes, the echo of
racquetballs, sweaty florid-faced hausfraus in garish leotards slumped at juice
machines, men with hairy jiggling breasts and gelatinous rolls of
stretch-marked belly fat grimly tramping on treadmills and
Stairmasters—nothing out of the ordinary. I undress in the locker room,
walk down a short hallway, come to a door marked SAUNA and open it. Through the thick steam, the first face
I recognize is that of Dr. Claude Lorphelin, a
gynecologist, surrealist poet, and neo-fascist pamphleteer who lives in the
post 16th Arrondissement of the
—Mark Leyner, Et Tu, Babe