Wise Blood

by Flannery O'Connor

Mrs. Watts’s grin was as curved and sharp as the blade of a sickle.

His black hat sat on his head with a careful, placed expression and his face had a fragile look as if it might have been broken and stuck together again, or like a gun no one knows is loaded.

It began to drizzle rain and he turned on the windshield wipers; they made a great clatter like two idiots clapping in church.

He had the feeling that everything he saw was a broken-off piece of some giant blank thing that he had forgotten had happened to him.

Hazel Motes cut off the motor. His face behind the windshield was sour and frog-like; it looked as if it had a shout closed up in it; it looked like one of those closet doors in gangster pictures where someone is tied to a chair behind it with a towel in his mouth.

Hazel Motes’s face might have been cut out of the side of a rock.

“I’m going to preach it to whoever’ll listen at whatever place. I’m going to preach there was no Fall because there was nothing to fall from and no Redemption because there was no Fall and no Judgment because there wasn’t the first two.

The man was plumpish, and he had curly blond hair that was cut with showy sideburns. He wore a black suit with a silver stripe in it and a wide-brimmed white hat pushed onto the back of his head, and he had on tight-fitting black pointed shoes and no socks. He looked like an ex-preacher turned cowboy, or an ex-cowboy turned mortician.

“You needn’t to look at the sky because it’s not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn’t to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can’t go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy’s time nor your children’s if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you’ve got.

Enoch was usually thinking of something else at the moment that Fate began drawing back her leg to kick him.