Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.
His father was so very old now that he slept most of the day. He was ninety-four. When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.
I love a good relish plate,” Wood Mountain said sincerely.
Thomas Wazhashk: I am not sure what study the information about our advancement, financially speaking, was based on. But I will tell you it was faulty. Most of our people live on dirt floors, no electricity, no plumbing. I haul my own water like most Indians in this room. I consider myself advanced only because I read and write. Should I not be an Indian person because I read and write?
Thomas remembered something from his boarding-school days. There, he’d strategized. The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.
Sometimes late at night the hospital emitted thin streams of mist from the cracks along its windows and between the bricks. They took the shapes of spirits freed from bodies. The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.
No. I don’t see,” said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.
He often devised sentences that began with his favorite capitals. Rs and Qs were his art.
Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, “Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord’s plan for your soul?
Harry lived with an ordinary-looking smart brown dog, named Edith. As happens when one person lives with one dog, the dog became psychic.
The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby – skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.
Why would she waste her time figuring out men when she was a person who had slept with a bear?
The snow had come down in the night, heavily, covering everything. Millie knew the moment she opened her eyes. The air inside was different, filled with a cold radiance. It was a struggle to leave her bed beside the radiator.
In The Sentence, books are matters of life and death, and readers reach through unknowable realms to maintain some connection to the written word. So with the bookstore.
Millie was talking about the classes she would take next semester. Patrice was listening to the titles of the classes. “What do I have to do to become a lawyer?” asked Patrice. Millie told her.
So Patrice continued to ponder her feelings. She wasn’t, as she’d heard in a movie, swept away. But she didn’t want to live her life by movie examples.
She slept hot just the way her words sometimes blew hot.
White double bloodroot and blue scilla covered yards on my path to the store. The leather knuckles of milkweed were pushing from the earth. Dark hemlocks and pine were tipped with tiny tender green needles. People wandered about like toddlers, bending over to look at last year’s dried grass. They watched the sky and examined the tags of newly planted city trees. And the air – it was a clean cold food.
I had to get out of my surroundings the way I used to in prison. There, I had learned to read with a force that resembled insanity. Once free, I found that I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books – the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character.
My dying tree reached toward the sky from its back down on earth. Its branches were like beseeching arms. It takes a while for life to leave green wood. I felt the helplessness, the lack of agency, the frustration of the tree. Severed from its roots, unable to taste the starlight.