Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

“working ourselves to death to keep ourselves alive,”

His father had a merciless eye that could find one bad straw in ten bales of good intentions.

They believed he was silent because his thoughts were simple. In fact, he kept quiet because he feared mistakes.

He massaged it in and thought of his mother, who forgot to look at him because her own life held too many troubles for her to watch.

He wanted to be happy in a solid, sustained way, hour to hour, not in turbulent little fits that gripped him at odd moments, usually when he was alone.

This I so true! We expect happiness to be sustained, rather than in the fleeting moments it arrives in in reality.

The kitchen seemed to grow. He felt himself shrinking inside it, a small man standing hungrily on yellow linoleum.

Brilliant example of those moments when we’re made to feel small by someone else.

His ejaculations implied some aspect of loss, and she loved to console him afterward.

He was fifteen now, a sophomore, and instead of growing up he seemed to be hardening into some sort of sulky, continuing childhood. He had no interests. He dressed ridiculously, in patched bell-bottoms and flowered, billowing shirts. His only friends were a handful of hippies and hoods who skulked around school like stray cats.

Brilliant characterization. In one paragraph, Billy is explained to the reader with such simplistic complexity.

“I’m going to kill him one day,

Will Billy kill Constantine?

Not true.

Slowly, with tenderness, she took his big suffering head in her slender hands and guided his face to her own. His breath was full of beer, strong but not unpleasant. Human. She thought he would pull away. He didn’t. She was frightened. She let the kiss go on.

His own flesh and blood.

She came into the room but didn’t enter the mirror. Poppa took his hand off Susan’s shoulder.

His heart was pounding with a love so awful it made him giddy and a little faint.

“You’re not the same,” she said. “You’re not the same boy. I don’t know who you are these days.”

He’d be old one day. He had to be careful about the past he made for himself.

She wanted something else, something more like what Alice must have had after she’d gone to Wonderland and then returned to the world of gardens and schoolbooks and laundry on the line. She wanted to feel larger inside herself.

Was she setting herself free, or was she beginning the long work of killing herself? How could you be sure of the difference between emancipation and suicide?

He watched her with a certain mute wonder. This, he realized, was where adults came from. They developed, suddenly, out of strange unhappy children like Zoe and himself.

He didn’t see himself anywhere in the pages of Life.

“It’s hard to live. It’s hard to keep walking around and change into new outfits all the time and not just collapse.”