I'd always thought of him as one of those fat catfish swimming in the Catawba River, trudging along the bottom with his belly in the mud, his mouth open, feeding on whatever he came across.

The only thing that ever leaves this place is that muddy water in the Rappahannock.

I write books with words. Numerous words. Words that stomp and stare and crush and collapse and boogie and bang and scream and laugh and manipulate. My books are a storehouse of words that form paragraphs that form chapters that form stories that form thoughts that live on long after you've read the last word.

It might be late September, but is was hot as the six shades of hell.

You're all I got.

Here we go again, changing face.

Nobody ever told me you can't bury somebody up North in the wintertime.

Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...

They later moved to a tin-roof house that was situated in a gas field under a spectacular flare that burned all the time. Big copper-green beetles the size of mice came from all over the Southland to see it and die in it. At night their corpses pankled down on the tin roof.

Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.