. . After looking curiously over his panes of glass one by one, I exclaimed: “What! You have no colored glass, no pink, no red, no blue! No magic panes...”
The savage girl kneels on the paving stones of Banister Park, stitching together strips of brown and gray pelt with elliptical motions of her bare arm.
The kiddie playground of P.S. 179. Children toss and tumble, a maddened sea of screams and limbs, in the middle of which, high and dry, sits Ursula’s boss...
Ivy is sitting by the unopenable window, in a wooden chair with arms that scythe around her like the pincers of a giant beetle.
Sure, trendspotters are supposed to blend in, Javier explains as they cling to the pole of the jostling subway car...
. . . Find the future, Chas Lacouture said, leaning back in his chair and allowing Ursula the view, the cloud-capped spires and fog-stockinged spindles of Middle City...
Ursula came here as a teenager, one of the thousands comprising the nightly spectacle that was and still is Harvey Street...
A squad car creeps along the paths of Banister Park, its headlights slowly sweeping around, sparking along the fence bars.
Chas unrolls the airbrush painting on his desk, pinning the corners in place with his desk phone, his cell phone, his Palm Pilot, and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol.
Ursula crouches against the wall at the end of one of the long corridors at Middle City Airport, an unused clipboard propped against her knees.
Their mother is here today, sitting by the bed in the only chair and reading a four-month-old issue of Self magazine while Ivy sits curled into a ball against the headboard...
The savage girl sits Indian-style, her back to the statue’s sun-warmed marble pediment, calmly but diligently scrubbing a large bone...
U is the axis of the woman in the man’s bed that is nothing but a bed. i is the axis of of the woman in the hospital bed that is also a bed of sand...
The savage girl on the screen is both voluptuous and strong. Her thighs are soft, while her haunches are muscular.
At night, in bed, Javier’s body becomes a lunar landscape of concavities—the hollow of his chest, the widening valley down the middle of his rib cage...
That guy in there,” Ivy says, pointing into a room as they walk by. “You see him?”
The two of them—James T. Couch and James T. Couch’s Irony—adjust their glasses on their nose and peer through the Plexiglas wall at the shadowy forms...
She finds Chas sitting in his darkened office. A small desk lamp in front of him glows meagerly, leaving a raccoon’s mask of shadow around his eyes...
The Black Tower’s conference hall has never been a cheerful place, but for this occasion Chas has taken the gloom to a whole new level, blotting out the already meager daylight...
The restaurant in the Pangloss Hotel is a five-star affair with five-star prices, but the theme is greasy-spoon-diner all the way.
The circular stairwell in the statue’s copper hull is as hot as a skillet and so tightly coiled that every step requires a pivot. Ursula dislikes the climb, but so do the tourists...
The front door cracks, and a sliver of Javier appears behind it, bed-headed, unshaven, in a sleeveless undershirt and a pair of rumpled wool slacks.
Ursula wends her way down a steep and curving section of Lansdale Street, staggering a little in the heels that she likes to imagine make her height seem...
I’m So SCHIZO!” is the title of a photo essay in the fragrant new issue of Mademoiselle. The spastic, jaunty letters of the capitalized word stagger across a two-page spread...
The revelers at Camille Stypnick’s upslope, split-level townhouse have come to celebrate the launch of Betancourt Rum and its concomitant ad campaign...
The shades are drawn, and the computer screen bathes Chas’s bleary eyes and papery skin in its pallid light. His head rests heavily in the seat of his hand...
The tips of Ursula’s fingers and toes charge with static electricity as she walks through the Plexiglas-lined cavern entrance to the South Slope Mall, the way a cockroach...
The savage girl always used to be doing things, making things, but now she’s doing less and less. For the last few days her only activity has been chopping the wooden slats...
The theme is apocalypse fashion today on the Ricki Lake Show, and the prostitutes saunter onto the set in catsuits accessorized with thigh-high thermal stealth boots....
James T. Couch leans back in his chair, his pale, naked arms folded over the white towel tied snugly around his rib cage. The two eyes tattooed on his nipples stare wide and crazed at Ursula...
Chas stands facing her in a white bathrobe, his neck and face red, heavy bags under his eyes, his wet gray hair combed back.
In the cab Ursula and James T. Couch sit very still, staring straight ahead. Slowly Couch turns his head to face her. She glances over and finds his face plasmatic with teeth.
Javier sleeps surrounded by machines, ventilating his lungs, drip-feeding his veins, stimulating his brain stem with gentle sound waves...
Policemen move the outer barricade, and the squad car taking Ursula to the scene inches through but doesn’t make it much farther.
“I saw a woman flirting with a bearded academic on the subway,” Chas says, his voice made even drier and more acerbic through the phone connection.
Ursula closes the station door behind her and crosses the small clearing, settling her pack on her shoulder. The rain forest greets her with its thick, sweet aroma...