The cranes were moving south and he watched their thin echelons trail along those unseen corridors writ in their blood a hundred thousand years.
Blood was a condition of their lives and none asked what had befallen him or why.
The slant black shapes of the mounted men stenciled across the stone with a definition austere and implacable like shapes capable of violating their covenant with the flesh that authored them.
And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world – which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name?
Memories dim with age. There is no repository for our images. The loved ones who visit us in dreams are strangers. To even see aright is effort. We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How make a world of this? How live in that world once made?
Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood.
People will go to strange lengths to avoid the suffering they have coming. The world is full of people who should have been more willing to weep.
He polished the underside of the messtray with the sleeve of his shift and standing in the center of the room under the lightbulb he studied the face that peered dimly out of the warped steel like some maimed and raging djinn enconjured there.
You cant have your ambient reality put askew without becoming somewhat askew yourself.
When you hear a sobbing child say it’s not fair you are always hearing the truth.
He kept complaining about everything until they finally turned on him and asked him just what it was that he wanted. That seemed to stop him and he gave it some thought and finally he said that he just wanted to be happy. At which they turned on him all over again and said no no no, Leonard. Realistic goals.
Your life is set upon you like a dog.
His father rode sitting forward slightly in the saddle, holding the reins in one hand about two inches above the saddlehorn. So thin and frail, lost in his clothes. Looking over the country with those sunken eyes as if the world out there had been altered or made suspect by what he’d seen of it elsewhere. As if he might never see it right again. Or worse did see it right at last. See it as it had always been, would forever be.
I was a born classicist and my heroes were never saints but killers.
I know they was families got thowed off their farms back in the thirties by the TVA and come to Anderson County and got thowed off all over again. They was even families had been removed from their homesteads in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the thirties, TVA in the thirties again, and the atom bomb in the forties. By that time they didnt have nothin.
They was some of em wound up just livin in the woods like animals. And that was a cold winter, too. People would see em crossin the road at night in the carlights. Whole families. Carryin blankets. Pots and pans. People tried to find em. Take em some flour and meal. Coffee. Maybe a little sidemeat. I think about those children. I do yet.
So if you get the impression from time to time that we’re sort of winging it here so be it. The first thing is to locate the narrative line. It doesnt have to hold up in court. Start splicing in your episodics. Your anecdotals. You’ll figure it out. Just remember that where there’s no linear there’s no delineation. Try.
Information and survival will ultimately be the same thing.
If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law?
The enemy of your undertaking is despair.