Status Updates From Almost Perfect

What Stella likes best, so far, about Santa Fe is the sky, the giant wafting clouds, now tinged with pale gold from the slowly setting sun. In the two days that they have been here, she has observed the most amazing cloud shifts and changes, from fleecy sharp clouds to thunderheads, in minutes. Yesterday in the afternoon there was a terrific thunderstorm, reminding her of New England thunderstorms,

Richard is dangerous. That is a sentence sometimes whispered by that same sane (feminist) woman of Stella’s imagination. However, since she knows her imagination to be fairly wild and unreliable, and also since she deals in words all day, it is no small wonder that various random sentences enter her mind. Probably she has thought “Richard is dangerous” simply to make her life more dramatic and exciting.

perhaps it is the unfriendly beach itself that is causing this mood of darkness in Stella. From the water’s edge, where she walks, Stella looks back to the forbidding dunes, and then, at the beach’s end, to the high, deeply crevassed cliffs of clay. The sand itself is coarse and cold, brown-gray, and there at her feet among the dirty bits of foam lie squashed-out orange rinds, here and there a dead fish