Motel Nirvana

ate a piece of battered plaice

On the flatter stretches, across the southern tip of the painted desert, for example, I prop a copy of Mark Twain’s Roughing It on the steering wheel and read. By the time I reach Phoenix that evening, I am several hundred pages in without knowing quite how I got there.

During the last great war, a team of military mineralogists began digging about under the sandstone around Moab looking for deposits of a mineral they called vanadium, which was a military code name for uranium.

tarmacadam stretching about ten miles along the plain to another hill. At the horizon

crêpe de chine left partly open, and partly covered by a chiffon pelisse