He floated on his back when the valise filled and sank; the river was mild and leisurely, going away from the people who ate shadows for breakfast and steam for lunch and vapors for supper. The river was very real; it held him comfortably and gave him the time at last, the leisure, to consider this month, this year, and a lifetime of years. He listened to his heart slow. His thoughts stopped rushing with his blood.
You’re a fool, a damn fool, an awful fool, an idiot, an awful idiot, a damn idiot, and a fool, a damn fool.
He realized that all men were like this; that each person was to himself one alone. One oneness, a unit in a society, but always afraid. Like here, standing. If he should scream, if he should holler for help, would it matter?
You can’t help people like her unless they want to be helped. That’s the first law of mental health. You know it, I know it.
People don’t talk about anything.” “Oh, they must!” “No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming pools mostly and say how swell!
Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?’ ‘I’d much rather recognize the inhuman in the human.
Crazy!” They spilled downhill, the sun in their mouths, in their eyes like shattered lemon glass, gasping like trout thrown out on a bank, laughing till they cried.
The stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of their way.
So much depends, of course, on what the individual hears when he gives himself over to the electronic tides breaking on the shore of his Seashell.
Is the programming on such an ear-button receiver of a caliber to enable a man to be a gyroscope, both taking from and giving to society, beautifully balanced?
We must try some other way, then,” mused Mr. Villanazul. “Someone must be – sympathetic – with her.” “What other way is there?” asked Mr. Gomez. “If only,” figured Mr. Villanazul after a moment’s thought, “if only there was a single man among us.” He dropped that like a cold stone into a deep well. He let the splash occur and the ripples move gently out. Everybody sighed.
The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.
His eyes took on a different color. It was a subtle shift, a flex, like a man stepping out from the shade of a tree into sunlight on a cloudy day.
There was a silence gathered all about that fire and the silence was in the men’s faces, and time was there, time enough to sit by this rusting track under the trees, and look at the world and turn it over with the eyes, as if it were held to the center of the bonfire, a piece of steel these men were all shaping.
Night after night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead.
And if we start using Celsius in the next few years, I will be severely disappointed.
A shotgun blast went off.
How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
Anyone could see that the wind was a special wind this night, and the darkness took on a special feel because it was All Hallows’ Eve. Everything seemed cut from soft black velvet or gold or orange velvet. Smoke panted up out of a thousand chimneys like the plumes of funeral parades. From kitchen windows drifted two pumpkin smells: gourds being cut, pies being baked.
What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.