Thursday prompts

This version of the story is in English. In Milan.

Sadness, that's normal, it goes with the territory.

Squinting against the late-afternoon sun as it cut through the birch trees
In the afternoons before the holidays Trish had started frequenting a restaurant a few blocks west of the apartment.

I loved a girl once. Every story starts that way, right?

There she goes. Who? That girl. What girl? You know. What's-her-name.

Florence Melnick went to the library every day.

They're married, but not to each other.

On the way home from hospital, Ava tells Charlotte that after her first husband was killed during a German air attack on Bari in 1943, she cried without pause for weeks, only to emerge from her stunning grief temporarily blind.

Once upon a time two men lived down the bottom of a nuclear missile silo.

Years before my sister Allie became the champion you know and love – winner of the International Matzo-Eating Contest, title-holder of the Conch Fritter Invitational, the girl who down nine sticks of butter in five minutes – she binged her way through a dinner dare that became her finest hour (and my longest).

Dolly's first big idea was the hat.

When I started out volunteering on Monday nights at New Day House, it was just me, Karen, and a rotating cast of eight or ten kids who, with their sticky marker-covered hands and mysteriously damp clothes, would greet us by lunging into our arms and leading us into the basement playroom.

From Wanda Farrelly-Johnson. Are we God's Children of Ham? And other Dilemmas of Black Historical Research (Pilot, N.C.: Lizard Ladies Press, 1983):

Tommy's cousin Gabe. Tommy's distant cousin Gabe from Stillwater, Minnesota. Tommy's cousin Gabe, related to my husband through divorce and remarriage, in lieu of actual blood, who arrives on my front porch at dinnertime with a duffel bag and fanny-pack. Industrial-sized.

Dear Doctor X, if I may call you that. Perhaps I should introduce myself.

I met Adam at the bookstore. He was in the section marked Biography/History.

You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun, your uncles and aunts thought so too.