In the light from the rising moon, a miniature statue shimmered on a pedestal: a statue of a dragon, carved from an enormous emerald. He nearly tripped over his own feet in his haste to reach it. He stretched out his hands. His mouth went dry. A dazzling light flooded the room as a door swung open. Toad froze. His stomach dropped through the floor. His arms were still raised, inches from the statue, but his eyes were transfixed upon the giant figure standing in the doorway.

The summer came upon the country like a conqueror.

I was writing up a New Mexico snow-storm, I had it coming down thick and heavy, muffling the roads and mounding on adobe walls and windowsills and whitening the piñon and junipers when the tapping came on the door.

Dawn rose from the desert and turned the river to wine

This night I'm thinking of, it had one of those skies where the stars looked poured from a barrel.

... the orange circle faded to a coiled spring of dully glowing grey.

Or dozing and waking under mosquito netting in a mess of slick sweat, gagging for air that wasn’t 99 percent moisture, one clean breath to dry-sluice your anxiety and the backwater smell of your own body. But all you got and all there was were misty clots of air that corroded your appetite and burned your eyes and made your cigarettes taste like swollen insects rolled up and smoked alive, crackling and wet.

I saw the delicate, pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.Poison.

Critters. Coulee and canyon and reckon-I-could. Fair-to-midllin' and fit-to-be-tied. Rig for truck. The polar opposite of gloaming and cataract, lorry and livery and bloody-well-right.

And it sounds like two tectonic plates are getting it on somewhere beneath us