She brought her pet snails to one dinner party in the 1960s and let them wander over the mahogany.

When he was ten years old, he got into a physical altercation with a friend over differing descriptions of a sunset.

She launched the airplane and it caught a current and circled down toward the town, like a promise of something good.

He wondered how the devil he would verify what he believed to be true.

She missed the last bus, for to go to Belfast, and she didn't know what to do.

He continued to see inevitable events from the past as avoidable, long after they'd taken their course.

She'd stopped looking tired a while ago and had moved on to whatever tired turns into when it became a lifestyle.

Confused, affronted, he clattered about the car getting a dinner together, then ate it without noticing.

She had no clear memory of that day; it was all in bits and pieces, like many different pockets emptied carelessly into the same drawer.

He wondered where the other boats had gone.

Slowly, very slowly, she began at length to sponge out the crimson juice of the damsons...

Like a modern-day alchemist, he counted drops of essential oils — oak moss, rose, sandalwood, sweet basil, rosemary and bergamot — into a glass beaker, occasionally pausing to contemplate his potion.

She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.

He started to believe he was as crazy as she was.

She crossed the road, deciding to take a different route and, as she walked by, she tried to take a look at the man's face but it was hidden by a baseball cap.

He knew then that he should never have pursued the caribou.

She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

He hurried past the robot, following his uncle into the inventing room.

She tried not to make waves and tried to fade into the woodwork.

He drew deeply on his cigarette.