What I mean is, everything is pretty much decided by the time these children leave here and enter kindergarten. I can tell who will be successful and who will fail, who will end up happy and who will end up in prison, and ninety percent of the time I’m right. Maybe Hollywood and video games have an influence, I don’t know.
I turned to Otto. “Why the hell did you hit him like that?” Otto looked back at me with eyes that sent a chill straight through my heart. They were lifeless eyes, not the slightest hint of light behind them. It was as though I were looking into the eyes of an inanimate object – the eyes of an end table, maybe, or a cardboard box. From.
The world doesn’t give even the slightest damn about us or our petty problems.
No, in the Bolitar household, the kitchen was more a gathering place – a Family Room Lite, if you will – than anything related to even the basest of the culinary arts. The round table held magazines and catalogs and congealing white boxes of Chinese takeout. The stove top saw less action than a Merchant-Ivory production. The oven was a prop, strictly for show, like a politician’s Bible.
At one time, this might have been a nice area, but now the neighborhood looked like a man who’d lost his job and stopped bathing.
The name of the group was Survivor,” Win said. “Ironic name when you think of how quickly they vanished, no?
Some people are conduits for misery.
When he finished telling her about the kidnapping, Esperanza’s first words were an incredulous, “Win has a mother?” “Yep.” Pause. “There goes my spawned-from-a-satanic-egg theory.
He moved from shrub to shrub. Some of the shrubs were familiar from his last sojourn into these parts. He said hello to them, chatted, offered up his best cocktail-party banter. One shrub gave him a stock tip. Myron ignored it. He circled closer to the Coldren house, slowly, still careful not to be seen. He had no idea what he was going to do, but when he got close enough to see a light on in the den, an idea came to him. A.
I remember everything about her. The way she looked. The way she smelled. The way she’d come home from her job so tired she could barely put her feet up. I don’t think I’ve talked about her five times in the past twenty years. But I think about her every day. I think about why she gave me up. And I think about why I still miss her.
The world is nothing but a bunch of thin lines separating what we think are extremes.
But grief likes to hide behind bushes. It enjoys leaping out of nowhere, startling you, mocking you, stripping away your pretense of normalcy. Grief lulls you to sleep, thus making that blindside hit all the more jarring.
They needed some Jews or gays or something to spice things up, to add a bit of theater and a couple of interesting bistros.
Another pause. Cameras pirouetted. Myron looked around. All the lenses were aiming down from up high, glaring at him like hostile space aliens or lunchroom monitors.
I can only be as happy as my saddest child. Do.
Introductions were made. Hands were shaken. Rear ends were seated. As was his custom in such situations, Win remained silent. His eyes slid from one side of the room to the other, taking in everything. He liked to study people for a while before speaking to them, especially in their home environment.
We always seem to be on the eve of destruction. And we always seem to get through it.
There is no place more hollow, more soulless, than a school at night. The building had been created for life, for constant motion, for students rushing back and forth, some confident, most scared, all trying to figure out their place in the world. Take that away and you might as well have a body drained of all its blood.
His voice not only dripped sarcasm but seemed to have spent days marinated in it: “How noble.” “Objection!
Death is so close, always, a breath away, so perhaps it was wise to introduce children to that concept at an early age. Maya.