Remember Haydn's 104 symphonies. Not all of them were great. But there were 104 of them.

It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

He wondered if she wondered if he were watching her.

But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

Don’t complain, don’t explain.

My circumstances of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction necessitated the short story form.