Accidental Tourist

He had somehow traveled to a point completely isolated from everyone else in the universe, and nothing was real but his own angular hand clenched around the sherry glass.

He saw the city spread below like a glittering golden ocean, the streets tiny ribbons of light, the planet curving away at the edges, the sky a purple hollow extending to infinity. It wasn’t the height; it was the distance. It was his vast, lonely distance from everyone who mattered. Ethan, with his bouncy walk — how would he ever know that his father had come to be trapped in this spire in the heavens?

She’s the good one and I’m the bad one. It’s not her fault, though; I don’t blame Claire. People just get fixed in these certain frames of other people’s opinions, don’t you find that’s true?

Money to Porter was something almost chemical — a volatile substance that reacted in various interesting ways when combined with other substances.

What Sarah needed was a rock, he wanted to say; someone who wouldn’t crumble.

Then she turned to something else, and something else, and something else. She believed in change as if it were a religion. Feeling sad? Find a new man! Creditors after you, rent due, children running fevers? Move to a new apartment!

Always bring a book, as protection against strangers. Magazines don’t last. Newspapers from home will make you homesick, and newspapers from elsewhere will remind you you don’t belong. You know how alien another paper’s typeface seems.

He liked the way cats kept their own counsel.

On trips even the smallest task required effort and decisions.