People love to believe in danger, as long as it’s you in harm’s way, and them saying bless your heart.
I said probably they were just scared he was going to put ideas in our heads. She smiled. “Imagine that. A teacher, putting ideas in kids’ heads.
Sunday school stories are just another type of superhero comic. Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.
The first to fall in any war are forgotten. No love gets lost over one person’s reckless mistake. Only after it’s a mountain of bodies bagged do we think to raise a flag and call the mistake by a different name, because one downfall times a thousand has got to mean something. It needs its own brand, some point to all the sacrifice.
I put my face to the window so nobody would see, if I tore up. Was this me now, for life? Taking up space where people wished I wasn’t? Once on a time I was something, and then I turned, like sour milk. The dead junkie’s kid. A rotten little piece of American pie that everybody wishes could just be, you know. Removed.
This is what I would say if I could, to all smart people of the world with their dumb hillbilly jokes: We are right here in the stall. We can actually hear you.
An older boy that never knew safety himself, trying to make us feel safe.
It’s not something to fix,” he said. “It means strong. Outside of all expectation.” I looked at him. He looked at me. His hands were on his desk with the fingers touching, a tiny cage with air inside. Black hands. The knuckles almost blue-black. Silver wedding ring. He said, “You know, sometimes you hear about these miracles, where a car gets completely mangled in a wreck. But then the driver walks out of it alive? I’m saying you are that driver.
He was quiet, holding that string and kite with everything he had. The way he looked. Eyes raised up, body tethered by one long thread to the big stormy sky, the whole of him up there with his words, talking to whoever was listening. I’ve not seen a sight to match it. No bones of his had ever been shoved in a feed bag. The man was a giant.
But the wicked have a different head for numbers than most. Any bad they do will end up on the side of never-mind. What’s done to them weighs double.
Never be mean in anything. Never be false. Never be cruel. I can always be hopeful of you.
Certain pitiful souls around here see whiteness as their last asset that hasn’t been totaled or repossessed.
I can still feel in my bones how being mad was the one thing holding me together.
Actual fact: you could make an entire second world out of what people throw away. The landfill is where I figured out one of my main philosophies, that everybody alive is basically in the process of trading out their old stuff for different stuff, day in day out.
We both lay back down, and she looked at me in the eyes, and we were sad together for a while. I’ll never forget how that felt. Like not being hungry.
Living in a holler, the sun gets around to you late in the day, and leaves you early.
Sometimes a good day lasts all about 10 seconds.
The first to fall in any war are forgotten.
You lie down with snakes, you get up with the urge to bite back. All I’m saying.
Counting on Jesus to save the day is no more real than sending up the Batman signal.