Diane Williams - Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine

As usual I’d hung myself with snappy necklaces, but otherwise had given my appearance no further thought, even though I anticipated the love of a dark person who will be my source of prosperity and emotional pleasure.

Mr. Morton arrived about 7 p.m. and I said, “I owe you an explanation.”

“Excellent,” he replied. But when my little explanation was completed, he refused the meal I offered, saying, “You probably don’t like the way I drink my soda or how I eat my olives with my fingers.”

He exited at a good clip and nothing further developed from that affiliation.

The real thing did come along. Bob — Tom spent several days in June with me and I keep up with books and magazines and go forward on the funny path pursuing my vocation.

I also went outside to enjoy the fragrant odor in an Illinois town and kept to the thoroughfare that swerved near the fence where yellow roses on a tawny background are always faded out at the end of the season.

I never thought a big cloud hanging in the air would be crooked, but it was up there — gray and deranged.

Happily, in the near distance, the fence was making the most of its colonial post caps.

And isn’t looking into the near distance sometimes so quaint? — as if I am re-embarking on a large number of relations or recurrent jealousies.

Poolside at the Marriott Courtyard, I was wearing what others may laugh at — the knee-length black swimsuit and the black canvas shoes — but I don’t have actual belly fat, that’s just my stomach muscles gone slack.

I saw three women go into the pool and when they got to the rope, they kept on walking. One woman disappeared. The other two flapped their hands.

“They don’t know what the rope is,” the lifeguard said. “I mean everybody knows what a rope means.”

I said, “Why didn’t you tell them?” and he said, “I don’t speak Chinese.”

I said, “They are drowning” and the lifeguard said, “You know, I think you’re right.”

Our eyes were on the surface of the water — the wobbling patterns of diagonals. It was a hash — nothing to look at — much like my situation — if you’re not going to do anything about it.

How tenderly she had arranged the gray pottery head of a woman on her mantel — the subtly revealed head of an archaic woman. It exhibits some bumps and some splits.

This was a gift from the Danish gentleman who had also given her a Georg Jensen necklace in the original box.

She had been lucky in love as she understood it.

And that night — some progress to report. Something exciting afoot. She has a quarter hour more to live.

Even if she only gets to the lower roadway, she’ll have to manage somehow.

Her boiled woolen cloak was wrapped around her tilting body and she was driving her car as if it were being blown away by the wind.

She had gone down this particular road to go home for years. This time she also arrived close by the familiar place, dying.

A tulip tree, tucked into a right angle formed by two planes, was brought into her view.

The police officer who inspected her dead body saw one area of damage and the pretty mother-of-pearl, gold and enamel Jensen ornament that was around her neck.

She has been associated with sex and with childbirth. No less interesting, she was a traveler on this unsophisticated country road.

Her facial features are remarkably symmetrical, expressing vigor and vulnerability.

My back started killing me and Tamara asked what else did I want and why? Oddly, she was suddenly unenthusiastic about me and she revealed resentment, of all things, and possibilities for her revenge.

But how busy I was! — building the twelve-by-sixteen rec room at the rear of the house.

I made bedplates and cut boards. And this was the day that Tamara baked her standard sponge cake.

When I reached for a taste of the cake, she took the plate away.

So I slapped her and drilled holes for anchor bolts, used a shim to level bedplates and my half-inch nuts to secure the bedplates.

“Have I seen that before?” I asked her, for by then Tamara smoked a cigarette near the site and she was waving an arm on which slid — up and down — a bracelet of lumpy blue glass.

A beautiful beam of light — perhaps it was aqua — was produced by the sun poking through the dangles at her wrist.

And then again that woman behaved unfavorably toward me, for I had laid my hands on her small-sized, stooped back, or I had prodded her.

By the next May, Tamara had departed and Hesper, her replacement, carried a tray of old-time spring tonic for the two of us. Yet Hesper is so perfectly content to pursue me, seeing as how I expected she’d soon lose interest in the project or not have any real knack for it.

At this point we marched around the yard attentively, and I could tell from her remarks, and from how she laughed seriously, that I would not need to worry too much about her — as if I’d considered all of the pitfalls and avoided them.

There was a green glow from the thin, scratched surface of the lawn.

And there was that underlying melody when Hesper groaned because she saw the gopher hole — rather, we saw that typical mound of soil.

We had to set a cinch trap.

After you catch a gopher, you tap it headfirst, dead, right back into the hole! That’s good fertilizer.

This isn’t just a big joke. Pests move in from other areas and damage can occur in a short time from new ones who reinvade the world of nature.

But after I put to death a friendship, a marriage?

There are people to take their places, who move in from other areas, of course. There are people who are dedicated to the true good, who work toward this goal. There are animals that may not.

The gulls in the wind looked to her like fruit flies or gnats.

Two gulls flying suffered an in-air collision. One fell. The other briefly stood there — appearing to do next to nothing.

The woman didn’t think she was supposed to see that.

So how far did the injured gull fall? — for it did not show itself again.

From the ninth floor, the adults in the street looked to her like children. But who were the children that she saw meant to be?

“We’ll have to knock ourselves into shape, won’t we?” the woman told her husband. She had once intended to evaluate their options for the improvement of their understanding.

She was fingering her glass that held water — the water that, of course, slides downhill when she drinks it — the water that one could say stumbles.

Now, in the back of their building beyond the river, there is a hollow — the unfilled cavity — although nobody can escape that way.

The woman went to bed that night with nothing much accomplished vis-à-vis the mysteries of daily life.

Her husband, next to her, squats carefully. Then he is on his knees above her.

He keeps his chin down, giving proper shape to what he is trying to express — his romantic attitude toward life.

People often wait a long time and then, like me, suddenly, they’re back in the news with a changed appearance.

Now I have fuzzy gray hair. I am pointing at it. It’s like baby hair I am told.

Two people once said I had pretty feet.

I ripped off some leaves and clipped stem ends, with my new spouse, from a spray of fluorescent daisies he’d bought for me, and I asserted something unpleasant just then.