The Grotesque

Solitude is a terrible thing, for it permits the imagination to picture, in detail, that which perhaps should never be articulated.

Strange how reluctant I was to acknowledge that control of my fate lay beyond my own conscious will. Habit of a lifetime, I suppose.

There is something I have learned since being paralyzed, and that is that in the absence of sensory information, the imagination always tends to the grotesque.

She carried a faint odor of cocktail sausages mingled with sweat. Like a fool I slipped my hand up the inside of her leg. I felt the roughness of her nylons.

Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and her throat swung bagged and cross-hatched from a wrinkled knob of chin flanked by rouged jowls loosely depending from lumpy cheekbones. Powerful gusts of stale scent emanated from the crannies of her person; the little dog was curled in her lap like a hairy tumor.

Hugo," she said, in a certain hurt tone that I knew well and enjoyed provoking, "you can be most horribly rude when you choose. Why do you choose?

Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.