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She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain.
A few locks of dry white hair clung to his scalp, like wild flowers fighting for life on a bare rock.
I lit the cigarette and blew a lungful at him and he sniffed at it like a terrier at a rathole.
Neither of them has any more moral sense than a cat.
The white made the ivory look dirty and the ivory made the white look bled out.
I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings.
Her smile was tentative, but could be persuaded to be nice.
His glass eye shone brightly up at me and was by far the most life-like thing about him.
He sounded like a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back. The half-room was an office split in two to make reception rooms. Mine had my name on it and nothing else, and that only on the reception room.
The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting.
The veneer had flaked off him, leaving a well-dressed hard boy with a Luger.
Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a great deal of domed brown forehead that might at a careless glance have seemed a dwelling place for brains.
She looked at me with a kind of mangled hatred.
“You think you’re smart and you’re so goddamned dumb,” I told him.
A moon half gone from the full glowed through a ring of mist among the high branches of the eucalyptus trees on Laverne Terrace.
He had the frank daring smile of an Irishman.
I went back to the office and sat in my swivel chair and tried to catch up on my foot-dangling.
Vivian’s lips parted slowly until her teeth caught the light and glittered like knives.
“Somebody’s always giving me guns,” I told him.
The world was a wet emptiness.
The move with the knight was wrong. I put it back where I had moved it from. Knights had no meaning in this game. It wasn’t a game for knights.
I was as empty of life as a scarecrow’s pockets.
He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
She brought the glass over. Bubbles rose in it like false hopes.
Blood began to move around in me, like a prospective tenant looking over a house.
I lay down on the bed with my coat off and stared at the ceiling and listened to the traffic sounds on the street outside and watched the sun move slowly across a corner of the ceiling.
It was five days since I had rung it for the first time. It felt like a year.
