There was extraordinary pain behind the ordinary nouns.
With love, one could glow. One did not need the intense flame after all. Now.
I do not think I have left my country. I think it has traveled with me.
With this girl – girl three in the queue – her story had made her so sad that she did not know the name of the place where she was at and she did not want to know. The girl was not even curious.
We looked as if we’d been cobbled together in Photoshop, the three of us, walking to my husband’s funeral. One white middle-class mother, one skinny black refugee girl, and one small Dark Knight from Gotham City.
He thought of Tom dancing with the girl, and he was happy. Sleep came, finally, with the music swelling into the vacuum in his mind where there had been only that high, thin whining. The gramophone spun and he slept, with the letter still in his hand. He had kissed Duggan as he was dying. It had seemed the only thing to do.
Good luck. Take quinine if it’s Cairo, take salt if it’s the desert, take precautions if it’s a local girl. Avoid gin unless good tonic is available, smoke no more than one pack, and keep anything made of metal on the outside of your skin. Dismiss.
Before, life had been a tradition, a tendency to forgiveness, a regression to the mean. The city she loved had been one of plane trees that had grown for three centuries, of bridges improved as horse gave way to steam, of great coordinated endeavors in which every convergent component could be relied upon; of symphonies. But now any light could be snuffed without warning.
Bullets is okay. Bullets is quick.
You could only be sad if you let yourself join the dots, if you allowed the scatter of moments in their totality to have some kind of a downward trend that you might be dumb enough to extrapolate.
We never tasted tea in my village, even though they grow it in the east of my country, where the land rises up into the clouds and the trees grow long soft beards of moss from the wet air. There in the east, the plantations stretch up the green hillsides and vanish into the mist. The tea they grow, that vanishes too. I think all of it is exported. Myself I never tasted tea until I was exported with it.
You will laugh at me-silly village girl-for staring at an ice cube like this. You will laugh, but this was the first time I had seen water made solid. It was beautiful-because if this could be done, then perhaps it could be done to everything else that was always escaping and running away and vanishing into sand or mist.
Yes but he is a man though, don’t you see? You could knit one quicker than you can make one fit off-the-shelf.
But the film in your memory, you cannot walk out of it so easily. Wherever you go it is always playing. So when I say that I am a refugee, you must understand that there is no refuge.
You ever wonder why an East Eng girl like me hasn’t got much in the way of family? Well here’s the reasons Petra. World War 1. World War 2. Falklands War. Gulf War 1. Gulf War 2 and the War on Drugs. You can take your pick because I’ve lost whole bloody chunks of my family in all of them.
But you are impossible, don’t you see? My other teachers are dazzled by you, or disheartened. And you are overconfident. You befriend the children, when it is not a friend that they need.
But life is not inclined to let any of us escape.
I realized that I was carrying two cargoes. Yes, one of them was horror, but the other one was hope. I realized I had killed myself back to life.
Your whole life, you had to fit it onto one sheet of paper. There was a black line around the edge of the sheet, a border, and if you wrote outside the line then your application would not be valid. They only gave you enough space to write down the very saddest things that had happened to you. That was the worst part. Because if you cannot read the beautiful things that have happened in someone’s life, why should you care about their sadness?
They say the eye sees, but there’s a blind place in the mind.” “And I say it is lack of effort. You must hold him to the same standard as everyone else. Because where should it stop, this fashionable clemency, once we allow that there are things we can see and yet be blind to?” The singing voices swelled in the cellar and the bombs gave the percussion, and the great injured city went further into night. “Oh, I don’t know, darling. I don’t know where it will stop.