Unit 1: Vocabulary from Readings 1

This bread happens to be brown, but there is also white bread, in the refrigerator, and a heel of rye you got last week, round as a full stomach then, now going moldy.

The bread they offered you is subversive, it’s treacherous, it does not mean life.

You don’t want to know whether the bread is real or whether it’s just a hallucination I’ve somehow duped you into seeing.

All the plaits, each with a blue barrette near the tip and each twisted into an uncommon sturdiness, will last until I go to bed that night, something that has never happened before.

All the way down New Jersey Avenue, the sidewalks are teeming with children.

My mother shakes her head vigorously. “I want her to go here,” my mother says. “If I’da wanted her someplace else, I’da took her there.”

On the table beside the woman’s pocketbook is a large notebook, worthy of someone in high school, and looking at me looking at the notebook, the girl places her hand possessively on it.

I see where she has darned one of her socks the night before.

The pheasants’ breath came out in quick little white puffs. Some of them lifted their heads and turned them from side to side, but they were blindfolded with ice and didn’t flush.

For this was the coat she had always wanted. There wasn’t another one like it, she thought, running her eyes over the other coats hanging from the metal rack or delicately draped over a brocade sofa.

...it was strange how she had never before noticed that everything has a smell: the earth, the bark of trees, plants, leaves, and that every animal can be distinguished by its own peculiar smell, a whole spectrum of smells that came to her on waves through the air, and which she could draw together or separate out, sniffing the wind, imperceptibly lifting her head.

She suddenly became very interested in animals and found herself leafing through encyclopedias, looking at the pictures—the hedgehog's pale, soft, tender underbelly; the swift hare, of uncertain hue, leaping; she pored over the bodies of birds, fascinated, pondering the softness of the flesh behind their feathers; and a single word kept bobbing insistently about in her mind: predator.

...and as she fled, as she left the city behind her and simply fled, it took an almost superhuman effort to get into her car and drive to the edge of the forest, keeping tight control of her body, keeping tight control of her tremulous body for just one more minute, before that slam of the door, that first genuine leap on feet free at last, shaking her back and her tail, sniffing the air, the ground, the wind, and, with a howl of pleasure and joy, plunging off into the depths of the forest.

She sat down before the mirror, tidied her face, touched up her lips and face.

They were looking for the weapon. The murderer may have taken it with him, but on the other hand he may’ve thrown it away or hidden it somewhere on the premises.