Slight though the diversion may be it was none the less appreciated—certainly more than he appreciated a European winter. It was a dreadful country, this Europe, cursed with a superfluity of water that fell from the sky in an appalling variety of forms, all of them obnoxious. If it wasn’t drizzli...
She can’t distinguish words at first, but the tones are friendly, muted and warm, which is something, anyway. She doesn’t open her eyes immediately. She is still too aware of her last remembered sensations: the suffocating weight of the bear, the moistness of its sweetly rancid breath on her face...
On this penultimate evening it has reached the banks of the Moltus, perhaps ten miles southeast of the city, where the river is about three-eighths of a mile wide . . . a broad, pellucid expanse of water that is like a steel cuirass protecting the soft, vulnerable underbelly of the capital.It is ...
After all, there were hundreds of thousands of people living in the crowded warren of interlocking buildings and narrow streets that interlaced in such recomplicated patterns that two noted topologists had written highly-regarded papers on them. And who would ever notice one more ragged urchin am...
I told the carny who was lounging in front of a tent festooned with banners proclaiming “See the Monster!” and “Man-Made Freak!” and “Frankenstein Lives!” and which were illuminated by pretty nifty paintings of something that looked like a cross between Boris Karloff and the lead in a high school...
Had she not been in the deep, cast-iron bathtub at the time she, too, might have been as thoroughly scattered over the courtyard and gardens as are her furniture, walls, windows and portions of ceiling and floor.The heavy vessel bongs like a church bell as it leaps a foot straight off the tiled f...