THE FIRST TIME HE SAW MR. KILGALLON HE FELL MADLY IN LOVE WITH HIM

1.
One of these dogs, the best one, had disappeared.

His father, a beekeeper, swore by the curative powers of bee stings.

2.
Among the company was a lawyer, a young man of about twenty-five.

Under the rock pile with his feet sticking out was a dead superintendent, a man with cracked heels and gnarled yellow toenails.

3.
Halfway there he heard the sound he dreaded, the hollow, rasping cough of a horse.

He was so upset he tasted his bile, an unusually delicious, flavorful bile.

4.
Poppa, a good quiet man, spent the last hours before our parting moving aimlessly about the yard, keeping to himself and avoiding me.

The hairless horse, one of the oddest things Markham had ever seen, loped over to the fence, making small, plaintive noises in its throat for sunscreen.

5.
Standing in the truck bed, holding onto the bars of the sides, rode the others, twelve-year-old Ruthie and ten-year-old Winfred, grime-faced and wild, their eyes tired but excited, their fingers and the edges of their mouths black and sticky from licorice whips, whined out of their father in town.

Whistling for birds, clucking for horses, Marshon stood on an upside-down bucket, his pants at his ankles and his toes covered with mud.