constructive
They're given random scraps and told to build whatever they can imagine. Cars with plastic bottle cap wheels, a walkie-talkie with a straw antenna, a castle made out of cups and toilet paper rolls.
decibel
The music at the frozen yogurt shop is so loud, the place so packed and noisy, that you can't think or talk to the person next to you. You just stare into your cup and eat and eat before it all melts.
fathom
We've gone so deep into the park we can pretend we're no longer in the city. At the pond we find a bench. Though it looks a little wilted in the heat, the pond is a nice spot I think. He sees it as stagnant. I can understand why, but I can't agree. There's always something alive in there. A mix of fish, turtles, plants and microbes. It's a quiet place, and promises whatever you can find in it; the closer you look the more there is. After our conversation, which has kept returning to life's disappointments, to uninformed choices that can't be undone, I want to be in a place like this, out-of-the-way and quietly overflowing with life.
jib
The tiny sailboats have ventured onto the water again.
raw
The cookie dough has already been prepared; now it's only a matter of cutting it and flattening it into cookie-shaped pieces before it goes into the miniature oven. Of the four residents at the table, one can wield a knife quite well. Another tries but can barely manage. A third pops a piece of raw dough in his mouth then resumes staring silently at the rest of it. The fourth curses when you get too near her. "I wouldn't feed that to my cat," she mutters.
trail
Forget the subway and bus; I'll find a new way home. And I do, on land rising steeply over a lake, where the inlets are coated in a vivid green scum, and the path curves beneath low-hanging branches.
wretchedness
The howl of a dog that doesn't know what she did wrong.
