The Chill

Some men spend their lives looking for ways to punish themselves for having been born.

Pour alcohol on a bundle of nerves and it generally turns into a can of worms.

In wine was truth, perhaps, but in whisky, the way Hoffman sluiced it down, was an army of imaginary rats climbing your legs.

He was half a politician, and like most of his kind he was an insecure man.

The sea was surging among the pilings like the blithe mindless forces of dissolution.

A moon like a fallen fruit reversing gravity was hoisting itself above the rooftops.

Ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. I learned that at my mother’s knee and other low joints,

his manner had the heavy ease of a politician, poised between bullying and flattery.

A young man with an untrimmed beard and rebellious eyes looked like a conscientious objector to everything.

I could smell fog even at this level now. It was rolling down from the mountains, flooding out the moon, as well as rising from the sea. The