Peyton Farquar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of Owl Creek Bridge.

Slowly, a bit distracted, he would get up and move among his men, checking the perimeter, then at full dark he would return to his hole and watch the night and wonder if Martha was a virgin.

It looked from every star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.

But this moment passed, and he could not find a place for that state of mind in his life.

Then I awake with a desire to urinate.

She uttered a smiling acceptance, hailing in the renewal of the tie an escape from Trenor’s importunities.

But the farmer is armed with plow and spade.

(In Order of Appearance)

Bierce, Ambrose. “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” The Millenium Fulcrum Edition, 1988. Project Gutenberg. 8 Mar 2008. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/375/375-h/375-h.htm

O’Brien, Tim. “The Things They Carried.” The Things They Carried. NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2009.

Douglass, Frederick. “Chapter VII.” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written By Himself. Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, No. 25 Cornhill, 1845. Project Gutenberg. 10 Jan. 2006; last updated Oct. 28, 2020.

Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. Translated by Marion Schwartz. Edited with an Introduction by Gary Saul Morson. New Haven, CT: Yale U.P., 2014.

Freud, Prof. Sigmund. “The Material of Dreams.” The Interpretation of Dreams. Authorised translation of third edition with introduction by A.A. Brill., PhB., M.D. London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1913. Google Books.

Wharton, Edith. “Chapter 10. The House of Mirth. NY: Viking Penguin, 1985.

Thoreau, Henry David. “Walking.”