When you’re inside your own story, you don’t see things like a reader. You don’t see your life in tidy paragraphs and chapters.
It was wonderful to see, wonderful to be in the middle of: we mud frogs awakening all around. We were awash in tiny attentions. Small gestures, words, empathies thought to be extinct came to life... It was a rebellion she led, a rebellion for rather than against. For ourselves. For the dormant mud frogs we had been for so long.
So distracting, so complete is she that she is gone before many realize that she had no escort, she was along, a parade of one.
You” – he pointed at me – “are the black pearl.
Unfortunately, he chose to put Arnold down at the one spot in town as bad as Finsterwald’s backyard – namely, Finsterwald’s front steps. When Arnold came to and discovered this, he took off like a horsefly from a swatter. As the stupefied high-schoolers were leaving the scene, they looked back. They saw the kid, cool times ten, stretch out on the forbidden steps and open his book to read. 6 About an hour later Mrs.
I’m pounding and kicking him and I’m all me and I’m kicking and kicking into the face that’s crying and begging for mercy, kicking, kicking... only for real, for cold ice real, it’s not my foot smashing his face to a pulp, but my stick smashing the puck into the board, and it’s not him crying, but me.
And I see. I hear. But not with eyes and ears. I’m not outside my world anymore, and I’m not really inside it either. The thing is, there’s no difference anymore between me and the universe. The boundary is gone. I am it and it is me. I am a stone, a cactus thorn. I am rain.
He thinks they may also imitate the sounds of birds that are no longer around. He thinks the sounds of extinct birds are passed down the years from mockingbird to mockingbird... He says when a mockingbird sings, for all we know it’s pitching fossils into the air. He says who knows what songs of ancient creatures we may be hearing out there.
Early on, Zinkoff’s mother impressed upon her son the etiquette of throwing up: That is, do not throw up at random, but throw up into something, preferably a toilet or bucket. Since toilets or buckets are not always handy, Zinkoff has learned to reach for the nearest container. Thus, at one time or another he has thrown up into soup bowls, flowerpots, wastebaskets, trash bins, shopping bags, winter boots, kitchen sinks and, once, a clown’s hat. But never his father’s mailbag.
The trouble with miracles is, they don’t last long. And the trouble with bad times is, you can’t sleep through them.
Have you ever stopped to appreciate the simple ability to open your front door and step outside?
I love beginnings. If I were in charge of calendars, every day would be January 1. And.
Early on I learned, without anyone actually telling me, that in this world it is not enough just to be. You have to be something.
Let’s promise to each other that if we ever meet again we will never plow and push our new-fallen snow. We will not become slush. We will stay like this field and melt away together only in the sun’s good time.
Whose affection do you value more, hers or the others’?
Tanks rolled up the boulevard four by four and the sky shook on its hinges.
You’re amazing,′ he would say, and I would feel like a buttercream with a hazelnut heart.
I am rain. I like that most of all, being rain.
I saw a little girl in a wooden wagon, her dress spilling colors over its sides, staring at the rising sun as if it were the very dawn of creation.
Like so many of Archie’s words, they seemed not to enter through my ears but to settle on my skin, there to burrow like tiny eggs awaiting the rain of my maturity, when they would hatch and I at last would understand.