I had one elegantly folded cookie—a short paper nerve baked in an ear.

The turkeys I eat are raised on farms. They're different. They've signed on the dotted line.

So I needed to be womanised. I was losing my sheen.

I watched my friend Eleanor give birth,' she said. 'Once you've seen a child born, you realize a baby's not much more than a reconstituted ham and cheese sandwich. Just a little anagram of you and what you've been eating for nine months.

This lunge at moral fastidiousness was something she'd noticed a lot in people around here. They were not good people. They were not kind. But they recycled their newspapers!

[T]he normal and the everyday are often amazingly unstoppable, and what is unimaginable is the cessation of them. The world is resilient, and, no matter what interruptions occur, people so badly want to return to their lives and get on with them. A veneer of civilization descends quickly, like a shining rain. Dust is settled.