She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.
We have all had stupid youths,′ said Mathilde. ‘I find them delicious.
This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said. Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.
In nearly everyone who had ever lived there was at least one small splinter of evil.
For many months up there he had looked down and considered how the lifespan of a sunflower reflected the lifespan of man: hopeful, beautiful, brightly shooting out of the ground; broad and strong, with a face turned full and dutiful toward the sun; head so heavy with ripe thoughts it bowed toward the ground, turned brown, lost its bright hair, grew weak on its stalk; mowed down for the long winter.
Every photo takes him a hairsbreadth closer to her, to the essential core of Helle, a purified Helle that he will one day hand back to her on a sheet of photographic paper. Here, he imagines himself saying. This is you. She will look at the print and know herself, at last, and she will wonder how she missed herself all along. Helle, seeing Helle as clearly as she sees the rest of the world: this is something to be dreamed of. It.
She is mad in both senses: angry and insane.
It’s true that the world is overrun with terrorists. It’s true that the mother no longer goes to movies in theaters, and she scans for the exits in restaurants. Deeper, worse, the death everywhere, the surgical strikes, the eyes in the sky. Aleppo in the beautiful before, the ravaged after. She puts these thoughts away. If she could, she’d spend the entire day in bed.
Fracking depressed, deep shale shattering.
I have always felt a sisterhood with bathtubs; without someone else within us, we are smooth white cups of nothing.
Now, don’t sigh for envy at my week-end; I am sure it is to be dull, my dear, and you know my horrible shyness and how I loathe such things. If only I had your vivacity and beauty! Alas, what we love in others does not always suit ourselves. I shall get through the weekend by wishing you in my place.
I like a bit of spunk in a lady.
Ever since the other boy had arrived half way through the semester, he’d been so blue, he was practically iridescent.
And then the wind smacked the house. Bring it on! I shouted. Or, just maybe, this is another thing in my absurd life that I whispered.
She moved through her life, letting the days drag her after them. But.
I like to think it’s a happy ending, though it is the middle that haunts me.
She curled into a ball to gather her strength and lay there, crying with anger and exhaustion. She was alone and she conceded to her aloneness, she would always be alone, she would always be in these puddles that grew even as she lay in them. For a very long time, she lay there, and it wasn’t terrible, despite the wind and rain upon her. It was only blank.
The world is sometimes too much for Bit, too full of terror and beauty. Every day he finds himself squeezed under a new astonishment. The universe pulses outward at impossible speeds. Bit feels its spin into nothing.
Never. Never for me. I’d die first. Never’s a liar.
Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of the year.
Men can do that, become more handsome as they grow older. Women just age.