When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax.
[Flannery O’Connor]

The city’s workers have redone both of the streets I live on (we’re on a corner), and the new pavement has a dark gleam that makes me wonder, almost every time I look out the window, whether it has rained. (It hasn’t, though it thundered earlier. I would be delighted if it poured.)