Bullet in the Brain

1.     dispatched (past tense verb):

dismissed quickly and efficiently, with minimal effort

“He was never in the best of tempers anyway, Anders—a book critic known for the weary, elegant savagery with which he dispatched almost everything he reviewed.” (Paragraph 1)

2.     accord (noun): 

agreement

“She turned to Anders and added, confident of his accord, ‘One of those little human touches that keep us coming back.’” (Paragraph 2)

3.     brass-knuckled (adjective):

openly aggressive and tough

“’Oh, bravo,’ Anders said. ‘Dead meat.’ He turned to the woman in front of him. ‘Great script, eh? The stern, brass-knuckled poetry of the dangerous classes.’” (Paragraph 8)

4.     torpor (noun):

lack of animation, slowness, dullness

“He was short and heavy and moved with peculiar slowness, even torpor.” (Paragraph 10)

5.   ammoniac (adjective):

resembling ammonia, smelling like ammonia, or a combination of urine and sweat

“He breathed out a piercing, ammoniac smell that shocked Anders more than anything that had happened, and he was beginning to develop a sense of unease when the man prodded him again with the pistol.” (Paragraph 20)

6.     gilt (adjective):

covered with a thin layer of gold

“Anders had never paid much attention to that part of the bank, a pompous old building with marble floors and counters and pillars and gilt scrollwork over the tellers’ cages.” (Paragraph 26)

7.     scrutinize (verb):

to look over something closely, in detail

“Now he had no choice but to scrutinize the painter’s work.” (Paragraph 26)

8.      gravity (noun): 

seriousness, sense of importance

“It [the painting] was worse than he remembered, and all of it executed with the utmost gravity.” (Paragraph 26)

9.     canted (past tense verb):

tilted, angled

“To make the cow sexy, the painter had canted her hips suggestively and given her long, droopy eyelashes, through which she gazed back at the bull with sultry welcome.” (Paragraph 26)

10.     neurotransmissions (plural noun):

transfers of information from one nerve cell (neuron) to another; neurotransmissions travel across synapses, the tiny gaps between neurons

“But before all this occurred, the first appearance of the bullet in the cerebrum set off a crackling chain of ion transports and neurotransmissions.” (Paragraph 35)

11.    flukishly (adverb):

unpredictably, by chance

“Because of their peculiar origin, these traced a peculiar pattern, flukishly calling to life a summer afternoon some forty years past, and long since lost to memory.” (Paragraph 35)

12.     synaptic (adjective):

relating to synapses, the tiny gaps between nerve cells where information passes from one nerve cell to another

“After striking the cranium, the bullet was moving at nine hundred feet per second, a pathetically sluggish, glacial pace compared with the synaptic lightning that flashed around it. “(Paragraph 35)

13.     mediation (noun):

intervention in a process; a mediator steps in to help things run smoothly

“Once in the brain, that is, the bullet came under the mediation of brain time, which gave Anders plenty of leisure to contemplate the scene that, in a phrase he would have abhorred, ‘passed before his eyes.’” (Paragraph 35)

14.     carnality (noun):

overt sexuality, preoccupation with sex

“He did not remember his first lover, Sherry, or what he had most madly loved about her, before it came to irritate him—her unembarrassed carnality.” (Paragraph 36)

15.     tethered (adjective):

attached to a rope or line that is secured, allowing freedom of movement within a given distance

“Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.” (Paragraph 41)