The First Sentence

“Monday—why was it even a day of the week?”

“Death, in this forsaken place, could come in countless forms.”

“I clasp the flask between my hands even though the warmth from the tea has long since leached into the frozen air.”

When I was a girl, my father told me the story of two cranes who set out to fly across the world together to fulfill their destinies.

There is no lack of drama in my life, I have more than enough three-ring-circus material for writing, but even so, I always approach the seventh of January with trembling.

It was my last day of freedom.

The end of the world will arrive, say the mendicant preachers, on the first of January 1500; God can no longer bear the deeds of evil men and will strike them down.

A hard gale blew in off the Atlantic at dusk, west by south, raising a steep, breaking sea.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a zombie in possession of brains must be in want of more brains.

Dear sir, I have no way of knowing if this letter will reach you, as the distance between us is so very far and so very troublesome.

Black crape covered the windows of the house.

Looking back now, I see it more as an act of pride than kindness that my father brought the young painter back with him from the North that spring.

She had been running for four days now, a harum-scarum tumbling flight through passages and tunnels.

I woke this morning with a stranger in my bed.

What is art?

Sleeping on the roof in the summer is customary in Tehran.

"He murdered his first duchess with his own hands, they say," the Ferrarese hairdressing-woman whispered as she braided a string of pearls into my hair.