Word: askew
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...askew. His third-day shirt has ring-around-the-collar. His thick, wavy clump of dark hair overhangs eyes screwed tight in a lopsided squint, a brow that is permanently furrowed and a leathery puss smudged with unshavable stubble. With stocky shoulders hunched forward at a 45° angle, he looks like an ambulatory cypress stump in baggy brown pants. And the raincoat. The raincoat is an oversized, unhung affair in the last stages of decomposition, scarred and seasoned with the grease of a thousand fingers, its hems frayed and stringy, its pockets attached more by habit than by thread...
Older customers still go for the tie-your-own, recalling a sartorial skill many learned years ago. Perfect symmetry is not the goal anyway. There is a certain virtue in a tie that is slightly askew...
Without a warrant, without identifying themselves in any comprehensible way, the agents had terrorized the Giglottos for half an hour. A unique blunder by overzealous investigators trying to crack a narcotics ring? Hardly. A little later the same night in Collinsville, a service station operator, Donald Askew, 40, and his family were about to sit down for a late dinner when their dog began barking frantically. Askew's wife Virginia, 39, was the first to see the man standing outside the open living-room window. "I looked," says Askew, "and the man looked just like my boy, long hair...
Then the scene that had taken place at the Giglottos' home was re-enacted, though less violently. Still, the agents broke through a side door that had been nailed shut. Mrs. Askew fainted. After a search and interrogation, the lawmen again realized that they had made "a mistake." Askew asked them to wait for the police, but the leader retorted, "We can't. We got four other places to go tonight." They left with no further explanations...
...Askews and the Giglottos want more consolation than that; they are bringing suit against the Federal Government. Evelyn Giglotto says that she can no longer sleep in the bedroom where she thought her husband was going to be murdered. Virginia Askew, according to her husband, has a history of "psychological problems." She has been in a local hospital's mental ward since the raid took place...