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She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming.
am merely a utensil, a temporary topic for the eternal discussion between her long eye and her deliberate hand.
You must have wished a million times to be normal.” “No.” “No?” “I’ve wished I had two heads. Or that I was invisible. I’ve wished for a fish’s tail instead of legs. I’ve wished to be more special.” “Not normal?” “Never.”
He had fallen into the momentary peace of blankness. His mind was stretched out flat, featureless. A
remnants of an old strongman act. He set up a gym on
That helpless rasp of death waiting as he hurt me … a feeling like that is special. Sometimes you hold on to it quietly for a while.
It is bitter for the young to see what awful innocence adults grow into, that terrible vulnerability that must be sheltered from the rodent mire of childhood.
The child, screaming for refuge, senses how feeble a shelter the twig hut of grown-up awareness is.
“Truth” was Elly’s favorite set of brass knuckles, but she didn’t necessarily know the whole elephant. If what she said about Arty was “true,” it still wasn’t the whole truth.
Past our corner of the meat yard the town began, or ended, in a blasted heap of storefronts leaning on each other to face a million miles of Texas rushing straight at them over the mindless, moundless plain.
There are parts of Texas where a fly lives ten thousand years and a man can’t die soon enough. Time gets strange there from too much sky, too many miles from crack to crease in the flat surface of the land.
“The winter sun is kind of green and doesn’t have the Go juice. That’s why you get so sleepy.”
He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy.
Conspicuous Absences and Superfluous Presences:
Even the Mexican welder sports one long polished nail on his smallest finger which declares to the world, ‘My life allows superfluity.’ I have this whole finger to spare, unnecessary to my labor and unscathed by it!”
‘The only liars bigger than the quack are the quack’s patients.’
“The more people we exclude, the more people will want to join. That’s what exclusive means.”
The click and buzz of my synapses kept making the same connection. If you can change, you can also end. Death had always been a theory to me. Now I knew. The terror hurt good and I nursed it and played it like a loose tooth.
“There are those whose own vulgar normality is so apparent and stultifying that they strive to escape it. They affect flamboyant behavior and claim originality according to the fashionable eccentricities of their time. They claim brains or talent or indifference to mores in desperate attempts to deny their own mediocrity. These are frequently artists and performers, adventurers and wide-life devotees. “Then there are those who feel their own strangeness and are terrified by it. They struggle toward normalcy. They suffer to exactly that degree that they are unable to appear normal to others, or
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power and pride, which, he used to say, “are the same except that pride leaves the lights on and power can do it in the dark.”
He must love me, I thought, amazed. A faint whiff of nausea hit me at seeing pain as proof of love. But it seemed true. Unavoidable.
In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It’s feeble to be an object. What’s the point of being loved in return, I’d ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning?
Then the real fear began. With the baby outside me and vulnerable, I suddenly saw the world as hostile and dangerous. Anything, including my own ignorance, could hurt her, kill her, snatch her from me. I wanted to cram her back inside where she’d be safe.
I am very old at 38. My arthritis is actually 110. But Miss Lick is even older because she is closer to death.
takes two steps to the average one because her mystic breastbone has spent thirty-eight years trying to increase its distance from her agnostic spine.
