Nelson Algren

The captain felt impaled. It had been a bit too long since he had laughed. Felt joy or sorrow or simple wonder. [...] / An iron heart, an iron life. Laughter and tears had corroded in his breast. In the whitish light of the query room a tic took a corner of his mouth and his lips worked trying to stop it, like a drunk trying to work off a fly.

Then the trolleys, like mild-tempered elephants, approached each other slowly and paused, with a primitive graciousness, to let each other pass; and went shambling forward once more upon their predestined jungleways as though the pause had lent each a greater understanding of all things. / Frankie came down , where only arc lamps and fire hydrants grow, [...]

‘I may die poor,’ he felt with his returning strength, ‘but I won't die tied. It's not for me, the common-law life.’ And fed the second doughnut to Bogacz the Milkman's horse. ‘You married, horse?’ Sparrow asked in his rasping whisper. / The old stallion rolled one white, derisive eye: he saw so many of this aimless order of alley wanderers, forever emerging out of the shadows to feed him stolen restaurant sugar or doughnuts or salt he didn't really want. He took them only because he sometimes got lonely himself over the week ends. Though knowing there are worse things than loneliness along the long hard road to the glue works.

Umbrella Man came in to Schwiefka's every noon with the Times morning line crumpled in his pocket, the daily double checked off and fifty cents in his hand. He never won and never complained. He came in with a bottle on his hip, made his bets like a man paying a bill, and left with the relieved air of one who has settled a long-overdue debt. The only return he seemed to expect was the privilege of climbing the same stairs and trying again another day.

It was Happy New Year everywhere except in Molly Novotny's heart; neither her heart nor her nest gave sign of the season. The stove was smoking again and she thought carelessly, ‘We get the ones the landlords buy up for old iron,’ of both the stove and her heart. The day comes when both feel past throwing heat. / It's like that for all hustlers' hearts: to pay the most and get the worst. The only thing a hustling girl has that doesn't get stopped up is her purse. And that's as full of holes as a married man's promises. / [...] She had never understood why she had lived with a man like Drunkie John, for whom she had cared nothing at all, and found the answer now: when a woman feels useless she doesn't think anything of throwing herself away.

Now dealer and players alike united in an unspoken conspiracy to stave off morning forever. Each bet as if the loss of a hand meant death in prison or disease and when it was lost hurried the dealer on. ‘Cards, cards.’ For the cards kept the everlasting darkness off, the cards lent everlasting hope. The cards meant any man in the world might win back his long-lost life, gone somewhere far away. / ‘Don't take it hard, your life don't go with it,’ was the philosophy of the suckers' hour. / But each knew in his heart, when he said that, that he lied: each knew that his life was reshuffled here with every hand.

‘Prove I'm nuts I go to the buggy bin – they feed you there, don't they? 'N if I ain't nuts I get the seat – so what? Then I don't have to bother with stinkin' squealas no more. It don't make me no difference. / Naw, I don't feel nuttin' good 'r bad. Good 'n bad is strictly for stinkin' squealas. [...] My old man? His one big trouble is he's always a pallbearer 'n never a corpse.’

A light like a mustiness left over from another century filtered through the single window, far above, too high for anyone but a fireman to wash. It had been so long since it had been cleaned that, even on summer noons with the sun like a brass bell across pavement and rooftop and wall, the light sifted down here with a chill autumnal hue. It was always December in the query room.

As the fever lowered Frankie dreamed of someone folding and refolding bundles of newspapers right beside his cot and forced himself awake to see who it was this time. / Only the old woman of the wind, there on the other side of the pane, wrapping the great sheets of the rain.

When someone yanked the cord of the unshaded night bulb suspended from the ceiling like an inverted question mark [...] shadows would leap from the corners in a single do-or-die try for the window; only to subside and swing awhile with the bulb's slow swinging. / Then the wooden benches along the walls [...] would be lit by a sort of slow, clocked lightning till the bulb steadied and fastened its tiny feral fury upon the center of the room like a single sullen and manic eye. To burn on there with a steady hate. Till morning wearied and dimmed it away to nothing more than some sort of little old lost gray child of a district-station moon, all its hatred spent.

And though her eyes were still bloodshot from crying Sophie suddenly sang to him with a certain phony gaiety, ‘You're gonna miss your big fat mamma one of these days – you know why I like that song? 'Cause it reminds me of one I really like.’ / In the icy dark the street lamp's frosty glow lay like hoar across dresser and wheelchair and bed. The clock was beating out its heart on the wall in a freezing pain and the luminous Christ gleamed all around with an icy, creaking mystery.

A few more days till summer vacation and out in the prison yard a great crane, straining skyward to see the first sign of summer, caught only a glint of rusted iron sunlight instead. These were days of clouds swollen gray with promise of rain – only to burst emptily and reveal the deepest sort of blue drifting there all the time.