I was doing exactly the same thing as Aislinn: getting lost so deep inside the story in my head, I couldn’t see past its walls to the outside world. I feel those walls shift and start to waver, with a rumble that shakes my bones from the inside out. I feel my face naked to the ice-flavored air that pours through the cracks and keeps coming. A great shiver is building in my back.
Cal wouldn’t have known how to explain that it wasn’t that he couldn’t handle the job any more. It was that one or the other of them, him or the job, couldn’t be trusted.
The air is rich as fruitcake, like you should do more with it than just breathe it; bite off a big mouthful, maybe, or rub handfuls of it over your face.
That suits me down to the ground.
It’s occurred to him that he might have an undiscovered talent for letting things be.
When she was a little kid she would trot along holding his hand and tell him everything, good and bad, it all poured straight from her heart to her mouth. He can’t remember when that changed.
The place makes it clear that whoever lives there has only themselves to please.
They brought in a mandatory sensitivity training session – which was fine by Cal, given the way some of the guys treated, for example, witnesses from bad hoods and rape victims, except the session turned out to be all about what words they were and weren’t allowed to use; nothing about what they were doing, underneath all the words, and how they could do it better.
You asked me what I wanted. I spent a lot of time asking myself the same thing. By a year or two ago, I had come to the conclusion that I truly wanted only two things in this world: the company of my friends, and the opportunity for unfettered thought.
It rains day and night, mildly but uncompromisingly, so Cal takes the desk inside and goes back to his wallpaper. He enjoys this rain. It has no aggression to it; its steady rhythm and the scents it brings in through the windows gentle the house’s shabbiness, giving it a homey feel. He’s learned to see the landscape changing under it, greens turning richer and wildflowers rising. It feels like an ally, rather than the annoyance it is in the city.
So you just like the country.” “I do, yeah. The city wouldn’t suit me. Hearing other people’s noise all day and all night.
If you don’t have your code, you got nothing to hold you down. You just drift, any way things blow you.
Leave her to sleep, sliding away forever down her secret underground river, while breathing seasons spun dandelion seeds and moon phases and snowflakes above her head.
He strikes me as a psychopath, and they lie easier than they tell the truth.
I wouldn’t say the carpet matches the curtains there,” someone else says.
The thing is that many of their most passionate moral stances, as far as Cal can see, have to do with what words you should and shouldn’t use for people, based on what problems they have, what race they are, or who they like to sleep with. While Cal agrees that you should call people whatever they prefer to be called, he considers this to be a question of basic manners, not of morals.
I had come to think of my memories as solid, shining little tings, to be hunted out and treasured, and it was deeply unsettling to think that they might be fool’s gold, tricky and fog-shaped and not at all what they seemed.
She must have thought, sometimes, of her namesake, the votary branded with her god’s most inventive and sadistic curse: to tell the truth, and never to be believed.
Frank,” I said, “this is officially the looniest idea I’ve ever heard in my life. You are off your bloody trolley. You are up the wall and tickling the bricks. You are – ” “What’s loony about it?” Frank demanded, injured.
I’m going to bet on someone’s wife hooking up with the guy next door,’ I said. The villainous nuns would have made better TV-movie fodder, but they sounded like a pretty big stretch to me. ‘Just playing the odds.