Sometimes, when there’s been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things – a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf – are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus. And.
Mr. MacNatt was an auto-parts salesman; Mrs. MacNatt was shaped like a pigeon and sold Avon.
Charles Portis shows his mastery of place and the more complicated subtleties of time.
But those sparkling blue shallows- so enticing at first glance- had not yet graded off into depths, so that sometimes I got the disconcerting sensation of wading around in knee-high waters hoping to step into a drop-off, a place deep enough to swim.
And that was it: infinite loop; no alt-tab out. You could force close, shut down the computer, start all over and run it again, and the game would still lock up and freeze at the same place. “Where’s Popper?” No cheat code. Game over. There was no way past that moment.
It is here that the stilted mannequins of my initial acquaintance begin to yawn and stretch and come to life. It was months before the gloss and mystery of newness, which kept me from seeing them with much objectivity, would wear entirely off... it is here, in my memory, that they cease being totally foreign and begin to appear, for the first time, in shapes very like their bright old selves.
The most satisfying of languages, Latin.
Out on the lawn, Bunny had just knocked Henry’s ball about seventy feet outside the court. There was a ragged burst of laughter; faint, but clear, it floated back across the evening air. That laughter haunts me still.
That is to say: I wanted to maintain the illusion that their dealings with me were completely straightforward; that we were all friends, and no secrets, though the plain fact of it was that there were plenty of things they didn’t let me in on and would not for some time. And though I tried to ignore this I was aware of it all the same.
I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested – ominously – a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
But poor Andy – even before he was skipped ahead a grade – had always been a chronically picked-upon kid: scrawny, twitchy, lactose-intolerant, with skin so pale it was almost transparent, and a penchant for throwing out words like ‘noxious’ and ‘chthonic’ in casual conversation.
A truck shot past in a whine of spray.
Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her – to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her – but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket.
How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother? I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.
Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us.
For humans – trapped in biology – there was no mercy: we lived a while, we fussed around for a bit and died, we rotted in the ground like garbage.
All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?
Son nuestros secretos los que nos definen, y no la cara que mostramos al mundo.
She cast a charmed theatrical light about her so that to see anything through her eyes was to see it in brighter colors than ordinary.
Her death the dividing mark: Before and After.