Flight Behavior

by Barbara Kingsolver

winning or losing felt exactly alike at this stage,

Little puddles winked

The trees clenched the last of summer’s leaves in their fists,

an underemployed mind clocking in and out

They all attended Hester’s church, which Dellarobia viewed as a complicated pyramid scheme of moral debt and credit resting ultimately on the shoulders of the Lord, but rife with middle managers.

But being a stay-at-home mom was the loneliest kind of lonely, in which she was always and never by herself.

a 911 Christian: in the event of an emergency, call the Lord.

People automatically estimate a mom’s IQ at around her children’s ages, maybe dividing by the number of kids, rounding up to the nearest pajama size.

she felt like a woman stoned for the sin of motherhood.

Whoever designed toys, in Dellarobia’s opinion, at their earliest convenience, should be smacked.

great silted curves swaggering down the length of the hill,

more water than seemed possible from the ceiling of any one county.

“Preston’s in kindergarten, half-day, so he gets home at noon. But Cordelia’s just eighteen months, so she’s a full-time handful.

She couldn’t even muster the strength for jealousy, given the size it would have to take.

The congenital Eagle Scout.

He and my in-laws face down hard luck six days a week, and on Sundays they go pray for the truly beleaguered.”

Dellarobia knelt down to get close, the myopic’s everlasting impulse,

Once her eyes knew how to see them,

Unsatisfactory answers crowded the waters around it, she could measure her life in those: because you are too young, because it was his time, because it isn’t done, because I didn’t raise you to behave that way, because it’s too late, because the baby came early, because life is like that, just because. Because God moves, it goes without saying, in mysterious ways.

Science as a process is never complete.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from everything that comes next.

The headscarf was printed with peacock feathers and twined in some inscrutable way with her vigorous hair.

It was hard to feel the remotest sympathy for any of the different fools she had been. As opposed to the fool she was probably being now. People hang on for dear life to that one, she thought: the fool they are right now.

he was just brooding, as he had been all day. It was so public and implicating, his sulk, like a forehead bruise on one of the kids that customarily made her blurt explanations to casual strangers at the grocery. Yet here she sat, detached, as if this gigantic miserable husband were not her fault.

At some point in the evening Dellarobia had stopped being amazed that Ovid had turned into someone new, and understood he had become himself, in the presence of his wife.

With the sense of a great weight settling, she recognized marriage. Not the precarious risk she’d balanced for years against forbidden fruits, something easily lost in a brittle moment by flying away or jumping a train to ride off on someone else’s steam. She was not about to lose it. She’d never had it.

Cub retreated to the familiar grounds of remorse and insufficiency, the terms of his existence, ratified by marriage. He could construct defeat from any available material and live inside it, but for once Dellarobia didn’t go there with him. She was going ahead.