You can do all manner of underhanded nice things when you have a caustic reputation.
Shadows of cloud lurked in the water, like holes the sun forgot about.
Very quickly, very suddenly, words fell through my mind. They landed on the floor of my thoughts, and in there, down there, I started to pick the words up. They were excerpts of truth gathered from inside me.
Mystery bores me. It chores me. I know what happens and so do you. It’s the machinations that wheel us there that aggravate, perplex, interest, and astound me.
I wanted to drown inside a woman in the feeling and drooling of the love I could give her. I wanted her pulse to crush me with its intensity. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I wanted myself to be.
I’m gonna hunt my life down and grab it.
You should know it yourself- a young man is still a boy, and a boy sometimes has the right to be stubborn.
How about a kiss, Saumensch?
But neither of us knows, because a fight’s worth nothing if you know from the start that you’re going to win it.
I only know that all of those people would have sensed me that night, excluding the youngest of the children. I was the suggestion. I was the advice, my imagined feet walking into the kitchen and down the corridor.
There was sex, of course. Nakedness. Wall to wall, in and out of my thoughts. But when it was over it was her whispering voice I craved, and a human curled up in my arms.
The day was gray, the color of Europe.
Often I wish this would all be over, Liesel, but then somehow you do something like walk down the basement steps with a snowman in your hands.
Humans, if nothing else, have the good sense to die.
Her teeth were like a soccer crowd, crammed in.
The Germans in basements were pitiable, surely, but at least they had a chance. That basement was not a washroom. They were not sent there for a shower. For those people, life was still achievable.
It kills me sometimes, how people die.
I think to be writer you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.
The scrawled words of practice stood magnificently on the wall by the stairs, jagged and childlike and sweet. They looked on as both the hidden Jew and the girl slept, hand to shoulder. They breathed. German and Jewish lungs.
He’s most likely robbing the bank as a paycheck on the world for winning the ugliness prize at his local fete three years running.