Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother’s mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.
She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.
She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.
Thomas Wazhashk removed his thermos from his armpit and set it on the steel deck alongside his scuffed briefcase.
The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim. Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.
The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.
She gave him a look that would’ve shaved his face if he had whiskers.
Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed – the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.
She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.
When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.
A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother’s skill set. Some stages are like being told to scale a cliff using a rope attached to nothing.
Nothing makes Penstemon happier than handing a favorite book to someone who wants to read it. I’m the same. I suppose you could say this delights us although ‘delight’ is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.
I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.
Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.
The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.
She died instantly, said Kateri, implying she’d not had time to use a bookmark.
I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.
The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.
I’m still not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books.
Maybe this was what being in a pandemic brought forth. When everything big is out of control, you start taking charge of small things.