The grammar of 'I hope', 'You better hope', 'I better hope'*.

'Rain falls out of the cloud you've sent into the model.'

('Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot, and also a picture of steam comes out of a picture of the pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture of the pot?')

'Good luck', says one barista to another who goes off to clean a bathroom.

A sniffler, a constant sniffler, wearing big salmon-pink headphones.

Two (subsequently embarrassed) baristas running into opposite sides of a swing door at the same time.

A rusty old Huffy parked just at the edge of a stand of trees.

A graying postal worker, sitting on a blanket in the grass before her apartment, her uniform unbuttoned, as one loosens one's tie at the end of a workday. She is writing.

A dog, of uncertain intentions, but blundering garrulous doglike velocity, called back by its owner to the door from which it escaped to meet me.

In advance of the throngs that will descend upon them on Sunday—the annual street fair—the funeral home on Grand has fenced its flowerbeds off with little more than a white cord, as if to say, meekly: look.