These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections-sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent-that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it.
The alcohol had the effect of making the black cloth blacker. This amused her; she had noted in her journal: “booze affects material as it does people.
He took the hat from my mouth. ″Tell me you love me″, he said. Gently I did. The end came anyway.
Please don’t let Daddy die Susie,” he whispered. “I need him.
Like snowflakes,′ Franny said,’none of them the same and yet each one, from where we stand, exactly like the one before.
I would do exactly what you are doing: I would talk to everyone I needed to, I would not tell too many people his name. When I was sure,” she said, “I would find a quiet way, and I would kill him.
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.