From the Bookshelf of Around the World in 80 Books…

Why does being alive have to mean always losing, always losing everything all the time?

Why does being alive have to mean always losing, always losing everything all the time?

This here jaw don’t flap until it get loose, got it? Liquor store down that road. He gestured vaguely in a direction where there did not seem to be a street.

I’m twelve years old, Eddie protested.

I don’t give a fuck if you’s a embryo, nigger! Git! Wanna know where your mama at, don’tcha?

With the land so flat, the sky took up most the view, and the bigness of the blue made Darlene feel she had shrank whenever she stared up into them gigantic puffing, curling patterns that was smearing and flicking through the sky, looking like a spooky painting, like a prelude to the ridiculous universe up there, where it wasn’t no air, and everything a quazillion miles from everything else and stars be diamonds. At the end of every day, while the horizon going black and she watching the stars and planets blink above the smoke from the planes, she thinking ’bout Eddie, and ’bout Sirius, and ’bout the billions of years since the water had drained off, and the billions that’s gonna come, and ’bout how small her world had become. Without putting no words on them thoughts, she got pretty sure that she ain’t matter, and she did break out running, but she ran back toward all the things in life she knew for sure—especially me.

Toward sunset, he peered into the far distance as the horizon turned crimson and cool breaths of wind raised and lowered the collar of his shirt. Then he told the guys I’m cold in a tone of voice that seemed to mean both I need to go inside now and I have been dead for a long time. In the balmy southern breeze, the phrase seemed to mean everything except what it said.