I reckon he only ever wanted you to be happy. That’s why he was the man for you.
The chewy meat center of their big ol’ spacesicle.
Youthful vigor becomes more rot than wisdom. Hopeful optimism is battered by harsh reality. Health and understanding seem to intersect in one’s forties, the one peaking as the other begins its slow ascent. Maybe you’ll know one day what you should’ve taken the time to appreciate. Maybe it’ll be when your knees start popping, when your hands no longer work like they should. It probably won’t be any sooner.
Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed.
The food in Silo One came from cans. Their bodies returned to the same.
Ahead, twin rows of crape myrtles dot the road. They’re losing their flowers. Purple petals ring the trunks, fallen mementos of a past bloom like photos from college years. But unlike people, trees flower again in the spring; they age in great looping circles. We ride a roller coaster once around, shuddering up clacking tracks and then screaming our fool heads off all the way down.
Holston lifted an old boot to an old step, pressed down, and did it again. He lost himself in what the untold years had done, the ablation of molecules and lives, layers and layers ground to fine dust. And he thought, not for the first time, that neither life nor staircase had been meant for such an existence. The tight confines of that long spiral, threading.
By the time you’re reading this warning, you’ve already acted responsibly.
She used to admire people who stood out, but now she could feel herself wary of them.
That’s the past, and the past is not the same thing as our Legacy. You’ll need to learn the difference.
That secret was a powerful drug.
I’ve been deputy almost as long as you’ve been mayor, Ma’am. Don’t figure on being nothing else but dead one day.
And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.
Heroes have warts; villains have soft spots. Main characters don’t always learn their lessons because all too often we don’t, either. There isn’t always a happy ending, but sometimes there is.
Look, I’m keeping the power on so they can do whatever it is they do up there, and I can’t get basic supplies. And even when I do, the quality is complete crap, probably because of unrealistic quotas, rushing the manufacturing chain –.
If he checks the colreg logs, he’ll see that I’m not exactly lying. I am under quarantine. What the logs won’t say is that it was a computer virus, and that the victim was my beacon. Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.
There was no going around it, so we tried to race back to the inlet, but the storm was moving too fast. Winds over fifty miles an hour. It hit us all at once like a heavenly fist, a mighty slam of stinging rain and raucous seas.
There aren’t any rules about how long you gotta know someone to know you love them.
We should use all the tools the gods gave us,” Juliette said. “Except for the one you wield, this power to make others fear.
But it’s more than the deaths I saw; it’s the destruction. The noise with which we go seems to make it count for more. I think of my buddies who checked out via hand grenade versus those who died from MRSA back in the VA. We barely notice the latter. They’re statistics. Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.