[Y]ou were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase [angle of repose] as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for...

The night stared me in the face, amorphous, blind, infinite, without frontiers. Not a single start relieved the darkness behind the glass.

A sense of wrongness, of fraught unease, as if long nails scraped the surface of the moon, raising the hackles of the soul.

She’d slept terribly the night before. The room, the bed, were both comfortable enough, but she’d been plagued with strange dreams, the sort that lingered upon waking but slithered away from memory as she tried...