All night I have bad dreams about severed hands. In one I’m eating chili and a hand comes out of my bowl and gives me the thumbs-down. I.
Kind little words, which are of the same blood as great and holy deeds,” flowed from his lips constantly.
All men labor under some impingements on their freedom; none is absolutely at liberty.
Great sobs choked his utterance. He buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame was convulsed with emotion. I stood at the foot of the bed, my eyes full of tears, looking at the man in silent, awe-stricken wonder. His grief unnerved him, and made him a weak, passive child. I did not dream that his rugged nature could be so moved. I shall never forget those solemn moments – genius and greatness weeping over love’s lost idol.
Two passing temporarinesses developed feelings for one another. Two puffs of smoke became mutually fond.
We left home, married, had children of our own, found the seeds of meanness blooming also within us.
Plus he’d been raised on a farm, or near a farm anyways, and anybody raised on a farm knew you had to do what you had to do in terms of sick animals or extra animals – the pup being not sick, just extra.
They were sorry, they were saying with their bodies, they were accepting each other back, and that feeling, that feeling of being accepted back again and again, of someone’s affection for you expanding to encompass whatever new flawed thing had just manifested in you, that was the deepest, dearest thing he’d ever –.
Oh, you break my heart. Why does everything have to be so sad to you? Why do you have so many negative opinions about things you don’t know about, like foreign countries and diseases and everything? Why can’t you be more like Chief Wayne? He has zero opinions. He’s just upbeat.
He was the sort of child people imagine their children will be, before they have children.
None of it was real; nothing was real. Everything was real; inconceivably real, infinitely dear.
I would have done anything to stop the hitting. Anything. So much for human dignity, I think, a few whacks in the ribs and you’re calling a fat guy God and eating soil at his request.
Sermon: Why this surprising? Did you think you were going to live forever? Only difference between you, sitting there anticipating rest of your day, and Todd, in coffin, bound for eternal home in cold earth? Is heartbeat. Feel that, people? In your chests? This is thin line between you and grave. So why do you live like you are eternal? That foolish, you are fools. This scary? This not scary! This truth, this reality!
Lightning strikes the slaughterhouse flagpole and the antelope scatter like minnows as the rain begins to fall, and finally, having lost what was to be lost, my torn and black heart rebels, saying enough already, enough, this is as low as I go.
World rips kid’s guts out.
If they ever get around to building The Short Story Museum, I think they’d better carve this over the doorway: ‘A short story works to remind us that if we are not sometimes baffled and amazed and undone by the world around us, rendered speechless and stunned, perhaps we are not paying close enough attention.
After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey’s syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could.
Of suddenly remembering what was lost.
From nothingness, there arose great love; now, its source nullified, that love, searching and sick, converts to the most abysmal suffering imaginable.
I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved.