Ten Tales Tall and True

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I am the descendant of a race whose stolid unimaginative decency has, at all times, rendered them the dependable tools of others; yet from my earliest infancy I grew self-willed, addicted to the wildest caprices, a prey to the most ungovernable passions until bound and weary I thought best to sulk upon my mother’s breast. Too romantic.

Call Me Ishmael. Jesus wept. Reader, I married him. Pithiness prevents flow.

I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops, a little see-saw of the right throbs and the wrong. Far too vague.

A man stood upon a railway bridge in Northern Alabama, looking down into the swift waters twenty feet below. The man’s hands were behind his back, the wrists bound with a cord.

That’s the style for me.

Eight men dug a trench beside a muddy crossroads, and the mud made two remember Italy where they had fought in a recent war. These two had not known each other in Italy, but both had seen a dead German who lay at a crossroads near Naples, though one thought it was perhaps nearer Pisa. They discussed the matter when the gang paused for a smoke.

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