Secrets don’t like to stay underground.
Memory makes demands that you often can’t keep. Memory is faulty because it insists on filling in the blanks.
The room did not go quiet like something out of an old Western where the sheriff pushes open the creaking door and sashays into the saloon. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe the door needed to creak.
If I have to cheer for you to know I’m proud,” Dad once told Myron, “then I’m doing something wrong.” Never.
Man may be evil or good, that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that man rarely considered the consequences of his actions. In short, man was often just plain stupid.
The early morning flight to Boise was uneventful. We took off from LaGuardia, which could be a lousier airport but not without a serious act of God. I got my customary seat in economy class, the one behind a tiny old lady who insists on reclining her seat against my knees for the duration of the flight. Studying her gray follicles and pallid scalp – her head was practically in my lap – helped distract me. Squares.
The pretty blond girl said, “Good evening, Mr. Sutton!” They were both clean-cut and smiling and neatly dressed, and for some reason, a reason Harry couldn’t put his finger on – a reason that he’d soon learn was primitive and instinctive and absolutely correct – Harry felt more fear than he’d ever felt in his life.
You hear about adrenaline, how it spurs you on and gives you uncanny strength, but there’s a flip side. The feeling is heady, out of control. It heightens your senses to the point of paralysis. You have to harness the power or it’ll choke you down.
But the irony would not hold. Schoolyards were not about innocence. There were bullies down there too and sociopaths-in-waiting and burgeoning psychoses and young minds filled prenatally with undiluted hate. Okay.
Every kid, Megan thought, is a frustrated lawyer, finding loopholes, demanding impossible levels of proof, attacking even the most minute of minutia.
It’s important to like what you’re doing. Choosing a profession is the most important decision you’ll ever make – more important even than choosing a spouse.
They say that happens a lot with the elderly that – to paraphrase Springsteen – two hearts become one. When one dies, the other follows.
Confusion helps. Confusion leads to lengthy reconstruction and clarification and exposition and several other “ions.
There is a fine line between a coffee break and a crack house.
Worn tires and ripped mattresses lay like war wounded in the middle of the road. Big chunks of cement peeked out from the high grass. There were stripped cars and while there were no fires burning, maybe there should have been.
People – old, young, black, white, men, women – hung everywhere, spineless, flopped over like Dali clocks.
For the first eighteen years of my life, I have zero memories that aren’t entangled in you. We shared a womb; then we shared a room. There was, in fact, nothing we did not share. I told you everything. Everything. There is nothing I kept from you. There is nothing I was embarrassed or ashamed to tell you because I knew you’d still love me. For everyone else, there is a bit of a facade. There has to be. But with you and me, there was none. I.
After three rings the machine picked up. Win’s annoyingly superior accent said, “Hang up without leaving a message and die.” Beep. Myron shook his head, smiled, and, as always, left a message. He.
We stayed a step behind the three boys. Every once in a while they would turn around and look at us, wondering, I guess, why we were following them. Sometimes they stared openly at Ema. There may have been derision in their eyes, I couldn’t say for sure. Ema was decked out in her customary black – black clothes, black hair, black nail polish, black lipstick. Tattoos ran up and down her arms and across her neck. I.
Extremists are relentless. They don’t see right or wrong – they see us and them.