[...] I am too personally at my own firm of Alan Schoenweiss and Associates. 'So then where's Mr. Associates?' the hilarious Solomon Silverfish asks me every time he has had a cocktail in my presence. 'When do I get to meet Mr. Associates?' [...]

[...] The train was called Dying, it was the Dying Person Express, was what everybody but the smooth pink healthy doctors seemed to know. Solomon also knew, though he did not believe. The train was called Dying and the louder it got also the smaller in your field of true vision. It did not run you over like a penny on a track but shrank as it grew to be nothing but a roar that came from deep inside you, where there was only the growing heat of a boiling fight between polysyllables. Here was a train you didn't know was on you until it was too late to get free of the bright knife of the track, a knife that cuts you to show that the ear has been hearing itself, a knife whose thin side is also a mirror in which you see what you hear while it cuts what you are. While you sink and burn. A sickness not at all delicate was what she had.

Sophie, in bed, drowsed, and bits of memory came at her in the flashing strobes of predreams. Here's a shiny ice storm, two newlyweds in a new tract house in Cicero. Ice glittering gray in a crunchy March lawn, more wet ice falling out of a sky without color. Solomon watching it out a window, Sophie behind him with her arms around his thick waist, her hair a black waterfall down his arm, her chin on his shoulder, also watching. Pellets of dirty Cicero crystal hitting the hard lawn, beads bouncing and jumping hopping lively skittering ice. Solomon's voice, quiet, full of Silverfish dreams, his breath fogs a rainbow circle on the window as he stares at the jumping beads, whispers to himself grasshoppers grasshoppers grasshoppers. A young man she loves dreams life into ice while she plays with his ear.

[...] feeling almost as though she and Solomon, or rather she-and-Solomon, will never really and truthfully die, no matter where or what they are. She feels through the promise of new pain and sickness of the stomach a brand-new sensation of cleanness and security, like a cold chill warmed, wrapped in a hot quilt on the lap of a mother who radiates a soft flame in gentle tones and tiny gestures of arrangement.

A thing that for her was magic Sophie was remembering as she drowsed in the orange light through the filmy window and her arm warmed with medicine. She felt the crackers in her stomach. It was 3:30 in the morning. Through a dream soaked the sound of the doorbell [...]

[...] I tell him S.S. child I seen love at angles you ass aint dreamed but I aint never seen no white man love a bitch like you love that tiless stick in that little metal band. My man get pissed off? He never get pissed off at Too Pretty. He just look in Too Prettys face with some bad eyes all aftershave blue and deep as his own head and ax me do I love my own self. And when I say shit whose black ass I gone love if not Too Pretty, my man say what it is, young Schwartz, he be callin my ass Schwartz, knock me out. He say that it rights there, Londell. The bitch be my own ass. [...]