My freckles felt like they would burst into flame.
One death did not salve another.
That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone.
Do go on,” I said, and it sounded just like Mother. It just came out.
Nature was always there, no matter what.
But things coming out of her, visible to the world? It was in a strange way another loss. You gave things away you couldn’t afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn’t take it back.
I lay my Webster’s on the scrubbed table in the lantern light, to learn that flotsam is the debris left from shipwreck, while jetsam is merchandise thrown overboard from a ship in crisis to lighten the load.
I wanted to put words between us, like spikes, to keep myself from falling into him like a girl without bones.
Wait for me, you said. Then left me alone in the echoing world.
No one considered that a key might lock as well as unlock.
The pine shadows moved across my blanket, the wall behind me. People were just like that. We couldn’t even see each other, just the shadows moving, pushed by unseen winds.
There were lockouts, bread riots. And absurdly, I turned seventeen right in the middle of it all. Ridiculous. An insult to celebrate such a thing when the whole country was sliding into the abyss.
The ridiculous way we thought male, female, as pants or skirt. Suddenly, the whole sexual universe and its conventions seemed fantastic, contrived.
When I’d been with Kolya, I’d been the moon, and he was the sun: he could give me his warmth or withhold it, pursue me or forget me.
Well, anyone could buy a green Jaguar, find beauty in a Japanese screen two thousand years old. I would rather be a connoisseur of neglected rivers and flowering mustard and the flush of iridescent pink on an intersection pigeon’s charcoal neck.
I’ll tell you this: history is the sound of a floor underneath a rotten regime, termite-ridden and ready to fall. It groans. It smells like ozone before a storm.
She wanted to know all about me, what I was like, who I was. I worried, there wasn’t really much to tell. I had no preferences. I ate anything, wore anything, sat where you told me, slept where you said. I was infinitely adaptable.
I was more his child than he knew. But my womanhood had put a permanent barrier between us. He didn’t know how to be the father of a woman, and womanhood could not be undone. The future already a fact.
It’s the difference between a true artist and everybody else.” Claire sighed. “They can remake the world.
On the anvil of August, the city lay paralyzed, stunned into stupidity by the heat.