Sipful

He drank slowly, leaving sipfuls in his mouth for a long time.

She cleaned his clothes, she fed him his meals, and at the same time, hidden in the kitchen, she would take sipfuls of baby formula herself and then feed it to the baby in a kind of nourishing kiss.

We learnt that she had been that way since her bereavement, hardly talking even to family members and unable— or perhaps unwilling— to take any solid food, though she was forced to take sipfuls of fruit juice or a hot beverage now and then.

Before they prayed over the objects and drank sipfuls of the holy water they had brought, my compadre added to the altar the peyote they had gathered from our recent visit to the peyote fields of south Texas.

And one night Joe was drinking and drinking beer from cans in the sunken living room, and several empty cans rolled around on the dusty-rose carpet by his easy chair, one or two drooling a little of that last sipful, that mixture of drink and spittle they warn you not to drink, backwash it’s called.

Colette’s evocation of nature’s enigmatic goings-on is very much in evidence: the cat purrs like “the rumble of a distant factory,” tame swallows land on her hair, and a spider regularly climbs down from its web to collect sipfuls of drinking chocolate from her mother’s bedside bowl.

The waiter did precisely what I ordered, giving me a few sipsful in the bottom of a glass.

The wife, between sipfuls of espresso and coloratura orders to a battery of maids, did manage to impart “make-yourself-comfy” notices to her crusty husband’s really far-out friend.