So down to Main Street and to Fifth Street, to the long dark bars, to the King Edward Cellar, and there a girl with yellow hair and sickness in her s… - John Fante

I looked down at the poor calf. Its hide was spotted black and white and it had the most delicate ankles. From the slightly open mouth there appeared a pink tongue. I closed my eyes and ran out of Hellfrick's room and threw myself on the floor in my room. I lay there and shuddered, thinking of the old cow alone in the field in the moonlight, old cow mooing for her calf. Murder!

The world was dust, and dust it would become...I gave up cigarets for a few days. I bought a new rosary. I poured nickels and dimes into the Poor Box. I pitied the world.

She walked over to my desk and pulled a page out of the typewriter. I didn't know what was happening. I still said nothing, but I could smell liquor on her breath, and then the very peculiar but distinctive odor of decay, sweetish and cloying, the odor of oldness, the odor of this woman in the process of growing old.