Oblivion: Stories

At night in the summer the dew-point is high and there’s always fog. It’s farm country. I’ve never once passed under 4 here without seeming to be the only thing on either road. The corn high and the fields like a green ocean all around, insects the only real noise. Driving alone under creamy stars and a little cocked scythe of moon, etc.

One of Laurel Manderley’s profs at Wellesley had once criticized her freshman essays for what he’d called their tin ear and cozening tone of unearned confidence, which had immediately become dark parts of her own self concept.

The context in which my friend then subsequently had it related to him by his acquaintance was if possible, he said, even more banal and unexpected than a commercial airline flight, as if somehow the quotidian and as it were modern everydayness of the narrative circumstances made its archetypal parallels even more remarkable.

Mother herself who is a decent-hearted if vain, bitter and timid female specimen but who is not a colossus of the roads of the human intellect, to put it frankly, could herself not ascertain at first if the look of insane terror was the response or the stimulus and if it was a response then a response to what in the mirror if the response itself wa

The P.P.O.’s counselor, who appeared to be in, at most, his mid- or late 30s, and wore spectacles, had a large forehead which was domed in such a way as to suggest deep thoughtfulness, an appearance which was, it increasingly emerged, misleading.

Seated together in the standard Midwest attitude of besotted amiability, the three of them had passed the midday hours in the Moltkes’ sitting room with the curtains drawn and two rotating fans that picked Atwater’s hair up and laid it down and made the little racks’ magazines riffle.

there were several moments of dead silence as everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might resemble or suggest.

The former associate editor in charge of the magazine’s SOCIETY PAGES feature had once referred to Skip Atwater as an emotional tampon, though there were plenty of people who could verify that she had been a person with all kinds of personal baggage of her own. As with institutional politics everywhere, the whole thing got very involved.

Laurel Manderley kept touching at the side of her nose, which felt naked and somewhat creepily smooth. She also had the kind of sick headache where it hurt to move her eyes, and whenever she moved her eyes she could not help but seem to feel all the complex musculature connecting her eyeballs to her brain, which made her feel even woozier.