The Complete Stories

Presently, with slow scraping steps, she came below the lamp to stand beside him, and it was as if the sky were a thunder-cracked mirror, for the rain fell between them like a curtain of splintered glass.

A blast of river breeze tossed the children’s laughter as they, linking arms, pranced like carousel ponies

It was suppertime, and, not knowing where to eat, he paused under a street lamp that, blooming abruptly, fanned complex light over stone; while he waited there came a clap of thunder, and all along the street every face but two, his and the girl’s, tilted upward.

A knot of pain was set like a malignant jewel in the core of his head; each aching motion made jeweled pinpoints of color flare out.

It was raining; in the wet noon light two nubs of candle still burned, and at an open window gray curtains tossed forlornly.

There was about her now an appealing softness; she seemed somehow less angular, less out of tune with the average, and Vincent, offering a glass of sherry, was delighted at the delicacy with which she touched it to her lips.

There are certain works of art which excite more interest in their creators than in what they have created, usually because in this kind of work one is able to identify something which has until that instant seemed a private inexpressible perception, and you wonder: who is this that knows me, and how?

Vincent felt as though he moved below the sea. Buses, cruising crosstown through Fifty-seventh Street, seemed like green-bellied fish, and faces loomed and rocked like wave-riding masks

A promise of rain had darkened the day since dawn, and a sky of bloated clouds blurred the five o’clock sun