Pluto

“Icy streams of neon light roar through ice-cream parlors, through dancehalls. Clusters of humming light dangle from whip-shaped lampposts over miniature golf courses. A flickering torrent of coldness. People HER age, enjoying the lovely peace and quiet of habit, loll around kidneyshaped tables. Tall glasses, containing long spoons, look like cool blossoms: brown, yellow, pink; chocolate, vanilla, raspberry. The colorful, steaming scoops are tinted an almost uniform gray by the ceiling lights. Glittering scoopers wait in containers of water, with threads of ice cream floating on the surface. In the casualness of fun, which doesn't have to keep proving itself, the young silhouettes relax in front of their ice-cream towers. Tiny, gaudy umbrellas stick out of the glasses, concealing the harsh detritus of maraschino cherries, pineapple chunks, chocolate chips. The loungers incessantly poke pieces of coldness into their own ice caves, cold to cold; or else they heedlessly let the good stuff melt, while telling one another things that are more important than the icy delight.”
― Elfriede Jelinek, The Piano Teacher

“he wanted to reach out and freeze her, stop her just as she was. Seize her from the woman who would steal her away a day at a time.”
― Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb: A Novel

“The world is a freakshow for my peeping eye's delight.”
― Suehiro Maruo, Ultra-Gash Inferno

“When Lamb turned around and saw the girl working her legs and sweating and squinting into the sun - Christ, what can a man say? It was like his bones had been wired tight all his life and seeing her that way, everything suddenly went slack, his mind unwinding like a spool of loose thread. What a man she rendered him, simply by being a girl who could be picked up and moved: what he wanted to be, what he ought to be, what was most unintelligible and unplanned and true in him when he carried her out of her fettered world to this. How powerful she was as long as she asserted no will of her own.”
― Bonnie Nadzam, Lamb