The Big Sleep

by Raymond Chandler

as white as fresh orange pith

about as warm as a slow oven.

stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men.

smelled as overpowering as boiling alcohol under a blanket.

A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wildflowers fighting for life on a bare rock.

the old man dragged his voice up from the bottom of a well

Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.

there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap.

You can have a hangover from other things than alcohol. I had one from women. Women made me sick.

fly-cluster of cars

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.