My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie.
Like a medical procedure,′ Ruth said. ‘Intricate surgery is needed to patch up the planet.
And i was gone.
About Grandma Lynn: She was waiting patiently. She no longer believed in talk. At seventy, she had come to believe in time alone.
She liked to imagine that when she passed the world looked after her, but she also knew how anonymous she was.
She could shut out the whole world, including herself.
I focused very hard on the dead geranium in his line of vision. I thought if I could make it bloom he would have his answer. In my heaven it bloomed. In my heaven geranium petals swirled in eddies up to my waist. On Earth nothing happened... I stood alone in a sea of bright petals.
When they reached the lobby and the doors opened I knew they were meant to be there, the four of them, alone.
They would go back to their homes and put me to rest, a letter from the past never reopened or reread.
Ruth had been a girl haunted and now she would be a woman haunted. First by accident and now by choice. All of it, the story of my life and death, was hers if she chose to tell it, even to one person at a time.
Horror on earth is real and it is everyday. It is like a flower or like the sun; it cannot be contained.
He had to seek out her eyes. They weren’t focusing on him. They seemed to be preoccupied, and he wished he could reach up and grab them and train them on here and now. On him.
When was it all right to let go not only of the dead but of the living – to learn to accept?
When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.
If you chose to go into someone else’s reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.
This wide wide Heaven is about flathead nails and the soft down of new leaves, wide roller coaster rides and escaped marbles that fall then hang then take you somewhere you could never have imagined in your small-heaven dreams.
Except when she was at work, no one knew where she was at any time of day and no one waited for her. It was an immaculate anonymity.
Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of is had needed it.
I realized how subversive Ruth was then, not because she drew pictures of nude women that got misused by her peers, but because she was more talented than her teachers. She was the quietest kind of rebel. Helpless, really.
That I wanted more. That night I dreamed of kissing her again and wondered if she was thinking the same thing.