Sublime

I thought it was the dictate of craft that had pared many of the Best American stories to a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns—like entries in a contest to identify as many concrete entities as possible, in the fewest possible words.

The hotel’s small cocktail lounge was known as the Hear Ye Room.

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.

IF THAT PERSON HAD PRETTY LONG ARMS

As his father lay on this plain bed in the sanatorium by the shore, at the same time he might very well be surrounded by scenes and memories invisible to others, in the still darkness of a back room in his own vacant house.

morose

one of those Canadianly inevitable checked-flannel shirts

On his wife’s clothesline, strung up between the two sugar pines, sheets and blankets popped shotlike in the wind.