The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare

what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling— through this sudden desert of existence

All her grace was in her vagueness.

Allison’s bloom was delicate and artless,

for whom present and future existed solely as schemes of recurrence,

it was fully the force of her own character that held and transfixed them,

The light in the photograph was fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster.

shone with the same beatific clarity.

the serene indifference of eternity,

What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection?

Words that slid off paper into emptiness.

she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.

affectionate contempt.

Sleeping or waking, the world was a slippery game: fluid stage sets, drift and echo, reflected light. And all of it sifting like salt between her numbed fingers.

there was a hazy, floaty air about her clumsiness that drove him crazy.

How could he make her love him, make her notice when he wasn’t there?

the horror of death without understanding.

her admiration was hard enough to win, but going for sympathy would get him nowhere.

she’d been quite colorless and plain (though radiantly pretty when she smiled);

“Darling, the world is full of things we don’t understand.”

I aint have time to fool with anybody always thinking about what they don’t got, and how they going to get it from another.

“It’s one law for the weak, and another for the strong.”

Her attention slipped from the words to drift without purpose—mindlessly

For the truth of the situation was that he would do whatever she asked of him, whatever it was, and they both knew it.

The devotion with which Eugene regarded his Maker was vocal, unwavering, and driven by terror. There was no question of Christ’s power to lift the burden of the imprisoned, the oppressed and oppressive, the drunk, the bitter, the sorry. But the loyalty He demanded was absolute, for His engines of retribution were swifter than His engines of mercy.

He preached to all who had ears to hear him,

but she had loved his face all her life,

miracles of ordinary light.

a welcome still point in the chaos of time.

But no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t quite forget that nobody cared if she was having fun or not.

the astonishment of being sucked into a blind, breathless emptiness:

intoxicated by the sound of his own voice—turned

dark lacquer of sadness had settled about the room, as it usually did whenever Harriet sat still long enough.

and the sense of ringing vastness, of being swallowed by the black maw of the universe—only the tiniest white grain in a sprinkling of white sugar that went on forever—sometimes made her feel as if she were suffocating.

anything he was able to take from somebody else he regarded as his own rightful property.

(wildly, in desperation, for her indifference was unbearable)

the pupils of her eyes so huge and black and swallowing that the irises were shrunk to nothing, blue coronas glowing at the edges of eclipsed moons.

And he was too ashamed to say what he felt: that his spirit was dry and empty, that he wasn’t naturally good, good in his mind and heart.

songs as old and mysterious as time itself,

How she loved Ida! The force of it made her dizzy.

The shadows were getting sharper, and more complicated.