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Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.
Three old ladies, straight-backed. Their caps had become hoods, their dressing gowns were sweeping robes, and all three of them looked at her with eyes that had seen sorrows like hers a hundred times: a quiet, remote empathy.
“I suppose that is another piece of advice for you, Laura. Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.”
“Look at the world now. It’s terrifying, isn’t it? We have flying machines. Phonographs. Moving pictures, even. Everything is changing so fast. Mother’s frightened. In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”
Don’t you understand? The world ends with high explosive, not trumpets, and even if an angel existed, it would be shot from the sky like an aeroplane.
Death lived there too, and sat at their cookfires, and ruled his own subjects, side by side with the living.
He whispered, “Winter said there’s ghosts all round you.” Faland snorted. “When you swim in the ocean there’s water all round you, but no one mentions it.”
“Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils”—his voice turned wry—“and I am the lesser.
On Laura’s fifth try, a sound like an explosion rattled from the engine, and the motorcycle sprang forward, bucking. Laura fell off. “Not the moment for dismounting,” said Mary.
Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world.
Still, now, whenever I touch a man’s cold fingers, I catch myself thinking, Well, he’s not a ghost yet.”
was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.
For a second, he was himself, and he thought, I am needed.
