Michael Chabon

He looked so profoundly disappointed in me that I wondered for a moment if he was someone I knew.

[His coat] emitted an odor of bus station so desolate that just standing next to him you could feel your luck changing for the worse.

Miracles prove nothing except to those whose faith is bought very cheap, sir.

He could not shake the feeling - reportedly common among ghosts - that it was not he but those he haunted whose lives were devoid of matter, sense, future.

But then, staring at the label on one crate, which readSWORD-CANE-DLUBECK SHOE TREE-HORASUITS (3)-HORAASSORTED HANDKERCHIEFS (6)-HORAJosef felt a bloom of dread in his belly, and all at once he was certain that it was not going to matter one iota how his father and the others behaved. Orderly or chaotic, well inventoried and civil or jumbled and squabbling, the Jews of Prague were dust on the boots of the Germans, to be whisked off with an indiscriminate broom. Stoicism and an eye for detail would avail them nothing. In later years, when he remembered this moment, Josef would be tempted to think that he had suffered a premonition, looking at those mucilage-caked labels, of the horror to come. At the time it was a simpler matter. The hair stood up on the back of his neck with a prickling discharge of ions. His heart pulsed in the hollow of his throat as if someone had pressed there with a thumb. And he felt, for an instant, that he was admiring the penmanship of someone who had died.

Although it wasn't raining anymore, the air was still heavy with water, and rain gutters were ringing all over Point Breeze.

This song always kills me, I said. She sighed, and then gave up. Why? Oh, I don't know. It makes me feel nostalgia for a time I never even knew. I wasn't even alive. That's what I do to you too, she said, I'll just bet. I was what everything I loved did to me.

this one-way rocket to Death in Adulthood" "Normal Time" in New California Writing

The winter drove them mad. It drove every man mad who had ever lived through it; there was only ever the question of degree. The sun disappeared, and you could not leave the tunnels, and everything and everyone you loved was ten thousand miles away. At best, a man suffered from strange lapses in judgment and perception, finding himself at the mirror about to comb his hair with a mechanical pencil, stepping into his undershirt, boiling up a pot of concentrated orange juice for tea. Most men felt a sudden blaze of recovery in their hearts at the first glimpse of a pale hem of sunlight on the horizon in mid-September. But there were stories, apocryphal, perhaps, but far from dubious, of men in past expeditions who sank so deeply into the drift of their own melancholy that they were lost forever. And few among the wives and families of the men who returned from a winter on the Ice would have said what they got back was identical to what they had sent down there.

Finally I reached into my pocket and flipped a quarter. Heads was Phlox, tails was Arthur. It came up heads. I called Arthur.

There's nothing more embarrassing than to have earned the disfavor of a perceptive animal.

The other day as I was stepping out of Star Grocery on Claremont Avenue with some pork ribs under my arm, the Berkeley sky cloudless, a smell of jasmine in the air, a car driving by with its window rolled down, trailing a sweet ache of the Allman Brothers' "Melissa," it struck me that in order to have reached only the midpoint of my life I will need to live to be 92. That's pretty old. If you live to be ninety-two, you've done well for yourself. I'd like to be optimistic, and I try to take care of my health, but none of my grandparents even made it past 76, three killed by cancer, one by Parkinson's disease. If I live no longer than any of them did, I have at most thirty years left, which puts me around sixty percent of the way through my time.I am comfortable with the idea of mortality, or at least I always have been, up until now. I never felt the need to believe in heaven or an afterlife. It has been decades since I stopped believing-a belief that was never more than fitful and self-serving to begin with-in the possibility of reincarnation of the soul. I'm not totally certain where I stand on the whole "soul" question. Though I certainly feel as if I possess one, I'm inclined to disbelieve in its existence. I can live with that contradiction, as with the knowledge that my time is finite, and growing shorter by the day. It's just that lately, for the first time, that shortening has become perceptible. I can feel each tiny skyward lurch of the balloon as another bag of sand goes over the side of my basket.

It was him, thirty years too old, twenty pounds too light, & forty watts too dim maybe, but him.

He felt, and not for the first time today, that he had not made a good decision in his personal or professional life since 1989.

I was afraid that I had made a profound, irrevocable mistake, and that, as in a fantastic tale, if I did not find something firm and magical to grab a hold of right that moment we would both be swallowed up by a noisome gang of black shapes and evil black birds.

It drains the bars and cafes after hours, concentrates the wicked and the guilty along its chipped Formica counter, and thrums with the gossip of criminals, policemen, shtarkers,and schlemiels, whores and night owls ... three or four floaters, solitaries, and drunks between benders lean against the sparkly resin counter, sucking the tea from their shtekelehs and working the calulations of their next big mistake.

Anyway, it's a pretty good story," I said. "You have to admit.""Yeah?" He crumpled up the Kleenex, having dispatched the solitary tear. "You can have it. I'm giving it to you. After I'm gone, write it down. Explain everything. Make it mean something. Use a lot of those fancy metaphors of yours. Put the whole thing in proper chronological order, not like this mishmash I'm making you. Start with the night I was born. March second, 1915. There was a lunar eclipse that night, you know what that is?""When the earth's shadow falls across the Moon.""Very significant. I'm sure it's a perfect metaphor for something. Start with that.""Kind of trite." I said.He threw the Kleenex at my head. It bounced off my cheek and fell on the floor. I bent to pick it up. Somewhere in its fibers, it held what may have been the last tear my grandfather ever shed. Out of respect for his insistence on the meaninglessness of life--his, everyone's--I threw it into the wastebasket by the door.

A smile opened, thin as a paper cut, in the bottom of Flowers's face.