If Nothing Else, I Will Have at Least Written This Sentence: Sentences from an Unwritten Novel

He often found himself in art museums on warm, sunny days.

The words were elongated and heavy, like a printing die, but all she could grasp was that someone was speaking.

He tried to think of a way of using the word parfait as a modifier, or a verb, but it just wouldn't happen.

And then it was that we saw him walking, truly and freely through the sun-drenched neighborhood, like a Yeti, unencumbered and surrounded by a halo of majestic natural wisdom, up and out of the dampness of everyone's negativity, from the angry drivers to the neurotic apocalypse seekers.

Despite being told, "No," at every turn, she turned every corner and held out her, "Yes."

Coming up and out of the neighborhood, as if it were Fitzgerald's valley of ashes, or Homer's underworld, he had the sudden urge to hurl his refill mug as far as he could, because he could--though really the culture had paralyzed such impulses for better or worse at a very young age--thus walking naked and unencumbered, although fully clothed, freely and truly as intended.

Technology was against him.

He liked the idea of strapping his laptop to the grill of his van and driving the van off a cliff, bailing out, of course, like a cartoon character, just before the van reached the bottom.

You would think that flinging the laptop from the Eiffel Tower, or into the Grand Canyon, would provide more than adequate satisfaction, but it wouldn't do at all, it wouldn't come close, because such a ridiculous height wouldn't provide the ultimate, necessary experience, which was in fact the end of the line; no, what he really wanted was to drop the damn thing from a parking ramp, maybe three or four stories high, so that he could still see and hear its demise.

She owned Saturdays, or so she led us to believe.

He was vary of listening to too much classical music, especially of the experimental variety, because it instilled a lie--a sense of immortality.

The feather drifted high and low on the current of the breeze, seemingly in slow motion, before landing in her lap as she sipped lemonade, languidly reclining in a chaise lounge in golden splendor behind a dark pair of sunglasses and capturing all of the afternoon sun, as if feather and sun and time were hers, and hers alone.

One of the Keebler Elves had lived on his street.

For once, he wished that the makers of Cheez Its would select an immature cheese.

In the final analysis, he was a big fan of the crunch, but the raisins, eh, not so much.

He haughtily ordered a half portion of reality, but later sent it back before the waiter could set it on the table.

She smiled as she lay in bed, remembering throwing the book out the window on the expressway at seventy-seven miles per hour which was undeniably one of the most satisfying experiences she had had all winter.

He was done trying to help other people get there.

As he slowly navigated the carpeted stairs with both hands on the banister, fully three sheets to the wind, he envisioned himself transformed into a Slinky.

She was more of a Zesty Italian than a Thousand Islands.

He was as pliable as Silly Putty.

Even though he knew that it was impossible, he felt as if he had come to the end of the list of all the verbs.

She was so angry that when the man handed her the expensive ice cream for which she had just paid, she stepped to the trash receptacle and pushed open the flap and cast the ice cream cone into ice cream cone hell.

He forced himself to look and see, insisting that his sight pass over as much as possible, the term "much" encompassing many things, including things he couldn't actually name, or things that he didn't realize he was actually seeing, and all the shades and hues were made more substantial by the dampness of the early morning rain.

It didn't really matter what he thought because he usually acted on impulse.

They only took cues from her, ignoring all of the other cue-makers that vied for their attention.

After making a sandwich, he often found he couldn't find where he'd set the tie for the bread.

In many ways, the health of the neighborhood was an extension of her will.

She was able to exhaust life just as thoroughly as travel from her bed or from the couch when necessary, or when she preferred to remain in one place, perfectly still, staring calmly out a window, her rich imagination traveling at break neck speed, a book of poetry splayed open on her chest as she drifted off to sleep.

It was as if she and the sun had been going for a walk, the lilac bushes near the cafe beginning to bloom, behind the fogged glass the regular customers lined up for coffee, the garbage trucks groaning from within the depths of the neighborhoods, the traffic making the damp streets sing, the sun leaning in to murmur in her ear as with each step, as the morning began and the sun continued to climb, her confidence soared.

He was the only liberal in the men's book group; it was awkward.

He guessed wildly that a grape-flavored snow cone was the key to her heart.

Oh, he thought about it all right; he thought about it for a long time.

He cut a hole in the car mat large enough for his head to fit through and wore it around his neck like an Elizabethan ruff.

There was nothing she abhorred more than standing in line at the DMV.

His final report concluded with the observation that one to three motorists ran every red light at every major intersection.

She asked herself how much sense it made to proselytize for peace across the universe when it couldn't be realized at home.

Beyond the fear she experienced as she willing stepped into the teleporter, there was no time to register how she actually felt--physically, emotionally, or spiritually--at the instant her atoms disassembled.

She understood in theory how altering even one trivial, mundane variable in the parade of outcomes in the colorful arc of the past could affect this moment to which she hoped to return.

Because of the all-encompassing, overwhelming presence of people and flat digital images, but mostly humans, wherever he went, coming upon a dozen or so deer grazing among the gray stubble of a harvested cornfield at dusk as he drove home from America's heartland was nothing less than surreal.

He made the run on the far post instinctively, and when the ball sailed across the six he caught it on his chest and smashed into the goal before it hit the ground.

He awoke from the faceless dream with an intense desire to write in his journal.

He stood at the reception desk about as dumbfounded as a Great Dane.

Vehemently opposed to sweating profusely, especially for a duration of locomotion lasting more than several minutes, she handed her trainer a booklet of Ponderosa coupons and told her to lose herself for the remainder of the day.

He admired the herculean efforts of the marathoners from the window of his hotel room, his hand holding back the heavy golden shade for a minute or two, before yawning and going back to bed.

He gauged his well being on whether he could sit through a film from beginning to end.

In the spring, yes, the spring, he was able to extend his walks through the neighborhood until they felt at least as long as his life.

He put the sign on the door and jogged down the street for a milkshake just as it began to rain, the rain clouds completely indifferent to his invisible cravings for a universal connection.

Every time he imagined himself standing up there on the podium, he was always wearing the wrong outfit.

By the time the others arrived on the scene, he'd decided to rewrite the ending.

In the aftermath of the opening, he felt a different door closing.

Her unbiased opinion was that there was a certain amount of negotiating that was inevitable, and enjoyable up to a certain point, but well worth the effort, the end result nothing less than the most majestic waffles ever assembled.

If she looked back, and was completely honest with herself, she had to admit that the best days of her life had begun with French toast.

Yes, a certain amount of frustration was unavoidable given the nature of this particular project, but he was learning how to make the pancakes go further.

He adjusted the wig.

She requested another hit.

He chose the leopard skin pattern.

Later, much later, after the book had come out, his attorney admitted that the dream defense had been risky from the start, but a challenge he'd been thrilled to embrace, believing that the jury possessed a better grasp of psychology than quantum mechanics.

The combined effects of her late-morning dream, which by now was only the vague outlines of a one-act play she couldn't recall--a muted, faded drama she had perhaps never seen but had only heard from the vestibule of her youth--and the malaise of a Sunday afternoon, which she recognized as a remnant from her pollen-filled Catholic childhood, almost always resulted in an anxious desire to go for a walk through the neighborhood in search of what felt missing, as if she would know it when she saw it while each twig, each stone, the anemic lawns, each porch, each storm-dirtied house, the dull cars parked along the curb, the abandoned toys, each stride, each swing of her arm served to rebuild her confidence.

The effects of the dream persisted well into the afternoon like a determined clump of yellow crocuses inconspicuously thrusting upward toward an ambiguous, noncommittal cornflower blue sky, disrupting an unnoticed arrangement of pale, dead, matted leaves at the base of a telephone pole, something only an artist or photographer would catch, the feeling of a lack, of missing a flight, of losing a wallet, of being told over the phone that the relationship had run its course growing steadily like the strength of the sun, the shortening of the shadows, until the weight of it, the significance of everything unnameable and beyond reach, hung directly overhead, pushing down on his brow, neck and shoulders while he sat on the patio sipping his coffee.

She paced herself, diligently reading fifteen to twenty a night as she brushed her hair, but the pages appeared to multiple each time she closed the book.

He told himself that it was only hair, that it was a temperate climate, that the shiny button which had gone missing from his shirt had fallen into the cuff of his pants, that the concert series had been a major disappointment.

His haircut was laughable, but she didn't because she didn't feel like sweeping up all the jagged little shards of his ego.

He could still taste the fried Lenten salmon patties of his orange-hued youth.

In trivial conversations with coworkers and friends, she often found herself arguing for and/or against what she believed she believed, depending on how playful or bored she felt in that particular instance, which ultimately diluted her beliefs.

He understood that his current definition of humanity would be stretched by ongoing cybergenetic investigations.

He sometimes wondered what his face looked like illuminated by the glow of the computer screen in the early morning while the house was still dark and the neighborhood murmured and tossed and turned as it roused itself from sleep and the donuts arrived at Quality Dairy.

When she walked into the meeting, all sidebars ceased; she held them there, in that moment, as if she had pressed pause, savoring her power.

Something odd was happening during the night, the resultant outcome extremely vivid dreams (some rearrangement of the vase of flowers, mostly tulips [which was how he thought of reality, and therefore memory] which reversed itself ever so slightly, although never completely, in the morning, like a glass half-full of water being picked up and set down on the opposite side of the night stand by a ghost, leaving him with a vague sense of having been manipulated by internal and external forces to which he had never been formally introduced).

After cutting through all of the red tape, he discovered red velcro.

Whenever he cut through the downtown hotel lobby, he felt like he was crossing Limbo, the antechamber of his own personal hell, perhaps.

The gray dome of weather made him feel like a trilobite.

It was with a sense of relief that he welcomed the dormant part of his imagination's takeover of his life.

She was coo coo for Coco Puffs; it wasn't a reach.

He only ever made calm, exacting movements for fear of stressing the fibers of his clothing.