I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

a profligate reader and purveyor of impertinent ideas.

dragging his shadow like chains.

Lark had the habit, when very tired, of predicting upshots in the lives of people just met. She never let them hear these yet-to-comes, these subsequents, which were purely for herself

Like always I stepped outside first to see what the lake was thinking. It’s called a lake because it is not salt, but this corpus is a fearsome sea and if you live in its reach you should know at all times what it’s up to.

the lake was sentient and easily annoyed.

They played some music, had a nice meal, and ingested the pharmaceutical known as Willow, a rising star in the market of despair. Willow was named for the sensation it was said to evoke of climbing through alpine tundra toward whatever comes after.

Narlis wanted to plan a dinner. It was his cure for everything, and he might not be wrong.

Again I was stirred by a nameless melancholy, by envy for those who lived within that frequency.

I didn’t yet know the word oracle but she had that smoky appeal.

Did I understand it? Not by half, but when it thunders you know your chest is shaking.

and anyone else needing an hour’s respite from the dark & lonelies.

It’s taken all my life to learn protection is the promise you can’t make. It sounds absolute,

and you mean it and believe it, but that vow is provisional and makeshift and no god ever lived who could keep it half the time.

It is not easy to make a friend let alone lose one.

There’s something in romance if it puts you on a boat with the one you adore, in a harbor no storm can penetrate, with an affable ghost anchored nearby.

In the end it was all churchmen and attorneys, even for Quixote.

the fingers of his burnt hand made pencilly sounds against the wall.

“These earthly matters trouble me no more.”

The world was confused. It was running out of everything, especially future.

Now it felt like part of his anguish was being passed on to me. God knows he had extra.

As omens go, an exultant bear is hard to ignore.

The sadness wouldn’t come off.

“You’re a man who stops and listens. If that’s not the definition of friendship, it’s close enough for now.”

He would understand how a cat or a poet could be alive and dead at once.

but I think we all accepted the grace of the overlooked.

We kept our home a temperature where the rhetorical was allowed.

Why do this to yourself you say, and I reply Why not? As enemies go, despair has every ounce of my respect.

Maybe you’re tempted to feel relief: he’s turned the corner! No. What corner? There are no corners—you know that.

Lark’s theory of angels was that they are us and we mostly don’t remember.

Like everyone our age, Lark and I had worn ourselves thin over the risks of introducing another life into generalized decay. She was the optimist, pointing at the bookshelf she’d already stocked with Pooh and Piglet, Sinbad, Despereaux, Charlotte, the Wild Things, Ratty and Mole. She’d also hand-painted a favorite Molly Thorn

He was suspected of wisdom but it’s a tough thing to prove.

All respect to proverbs, sometimes they’re mistaken. Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.

How are you feeling? Her instant reply, Probably doomed and perplexingly merry, was a concise report of our handmade lives.

A storm is nothing to fear if you’re snugly anchored with hot soup in a cup.

Nothing sinks your spirit like your own cruelty.

Rubicons get crossed for all kinds of petty reasons.

“It’s the stupids who live forever.”

“Words are one way we leave tracks in the world,

She said Pastor Leake was a decent man who often mistook his worldview for the world, a common churchman’s error. She said the church was a broken compass. That our job always and forever was to refuse Apocalypse in all its forms and work cheerfully against it.

Even convicts want spicy gossip.

I am always last to see the beauty I inhabit.