We are born faithful and afraid, when it should be the opposite; it is life that teaches us how much we stand to lose.
The grass was tall and parched, the limbs of the trees barren or else dotted with a few remaining leaves, the stragglers, bleached to the color of bone. They lifted in the breeze like waving hands, rustling like old paper.
So, at the last, a story.
They were like a vision, they had slipped into eternity, a zone beyond time. There and not there, a presence unseen but felt, like stars in the daytime sky.
He had entered sleep’s antechamber, the place where dreams and memories mingled, telling their strange stories; yet part of him was still in the car, listening to the rain.
Sometimes this place is like a big rudeness contest, but it’s worth the hassle.
If things had happened differently, they might have been just like any other brother and sister, their importance to one another fading over time as new connections took precedence. But not the two of them. New people would take the stage, but there would always be a room in their hearts in which only the two of them resided.
I was in a room of the bluest light – pure blue, cerulean blue, the blue the sky would be if it were married to the sea.
There were times when you couldn’t fix what was broken with words, and this looked like one of those times.
I felt, driving home, that for the first time in many years, maybe ever, I was coming truly alive, and here’s the thing: the problem of being alive is that it makes you frightened.
His old man, who’d smoked like he did, had spent the last five years of his life in a little cart sucking on a tank, until he’d done the big face-plant just a month before his sixtieth birthday.
But I suppose it’s part of being old to feel that way, half in one world and half in the other, all of it mixed together in my mind. No one’s left who even knows my name. Folks call me Auntie, on account of I never could have children of my own, and I guess that suits me fine. Sometime it’s like I’ve got so many people inside of me I’m never alone at all. And when I go, I’ll be taking them with me.
I wanted to kill them. No, not kill. “Kill” is too dull a word for that which I desired. I wanted to annihilate them. I wanted to tear them limb from limb. I wanted to crack their bones and bury my face in the wet remains. I wanted to reach inside their chests and yank out their hearts and devour the bloody meat as the last stray current twitched the muscle and watch their faces as they died.
Sunset was an hour off but the clouds were hanging low, sponging up the last of the light.
This is a writ of commutation, Anthony, signed by Governor Jenna Bush.
He was Babcock and he was forever. He was one of Twelve and also the Other, the one above and behind, the Zero. He was the night of nights and he had been Babcock before he became what he was. Before the great hunger that was like time itself inside him, a current in the blood, endless and needful, infinite and without border, a dark wing spreading over the world.
Hope was a thing that gave you pain, and that’s what this girl was. A painful sort of hope.
Too many what-ifs are just a way to keep yourself up at night, and there’s not enough decent sleep to go around.
An unanticipated longing washed over him; how he wished his father were here. For weeks he had kept this feeling at bay. Holding his son in his arms, he could no longer. Tears poured from his eyes.
And how am I to face the odds Of man’s bedevilment and God’s?