1. That sunrise is not from new earth.

So am I standing in some
other world right now? The terrain is a mix of at least three worlds.

2. He concluded "I am the caretaker of the Underworld. This world

is under my protection. Anybody who wants to conquer this place
will have to go through me".

3. Oh well, no option left. He would have to do it the less legal, but

definitely the easier way.

4. Hurt flashes across the pretty girl's face as she looks at me.
Her hands fall from my shoulders and hang limply by her side.

5. She doesn't have to know what I do to earn money for college

and for our family.

6. It was getting dark and she needed to be inside her house

before the first moon rose. Odd things had been happening
recently.

7. She thought of him coming home, finding the gas and phone
bills in the mailbox, undressing, taking a bath, the T.V. on. 
8. We talked about women, peeked up their legs as they got out
of cars, and we looked into the windows at night hoping to see
somebody fucking but we never saw anybody. 

9. I remember jacking off in the closet after putting on my mother's

high heels and looking at my legs in the mirror, slowly drawing a
cloth up over my legs, higher and higher as if peeking up the legs
of a woman.

10. It was like a wood drill, it might have been a wood drill, I could
smell the oil burning, and they'd stick that thing into my head into
my flesh and it would drill and bring up blood and puss.

11. Under the quilt she makes no more of a hump than a railroad
would, and the only way you can tell she is breathing is by the
sound of the mattress shucks. 

12. I used to lie on the pallet in the hall, waiting until I could hear
them asleep, so I could get up and go back to the bucket.

13. The jewel is enclosed by a glittering maze of hooves as by an

illusion of wings; among them, beneath the up reared chest, he
moves with the flashing limberness of a snake. 
1. He took a few steps back, then ran up and leapt off, clearing
the road easily and landing on the opposite roof.

2. And then my eyes roam again over the words scribbled in the
corner.
_Sorry I read your journal. You left it open. You know I can't resist
temptation like this!_

3. But when days passed and nothing happened, neither an

answer nor any fatality, people relaxed and got on with their lives.

4. He picked the semi-conscious man upon his shoulders like a

sack of potatoes and melted back into the night.

5. A pulse beat in his neck and another joined in. Hers. Two
hearts beating in tandem. He would never get over her now!

6. I'd shove the bottles and stuff toward him and wait, puffing on a
cigarette like I owned the world. 
7. What had once been a flat surface was now a succession of
troughs and hillocks lifting and falling about us, shoving at us,
teasing at us with light lazy touches in the vain instants of
solidarity underfoot. 

8. From here they do not appear to violate the surface at all; it is

as though it had severed them both at a single blow, the two
torsos moving with infinitesimal and ludicrous care upon the
surface.

9. It looks peaceful, like machinery does after you have watched it

and listened to it for a long time. 

10. It would just be for me and her on a high hill and me rolling the
rocks down the hill at their faces, picking them up and throwing
them down the hill, faces and teeth. 

11. He has returned to the trestles, stooped again in the lantern's

feeble glare as he gathers up his tools and wipes them on a cloth
carefully and puts them down into the box with its leather sling to
go over the shoulder.