I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

Like all explorers they had a credo. Go in search of better.

I began watching everyone I met for secret greatness.

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.

In dark times, few things lift spirits like a revelry.

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

I’ve heard many griefstruck keep expecting the loved one to appear. There’s an urge to phone the lost member, to write a note about the sunrise or good coffee or the flurry of waxwings among the berries.

The loss is less remembered than received fresh each time.

Lawmen will invoke the law but the only law they really know is gravity.

Maybe now and then the windmill is a giant.

“They weren’t suicides,” she said. “All right.” “They were stepping through the door,” she informed me.

I remembered now that Harry the drummer once ate only cheese for a month. Part of a ritual or propitiation condoned by a secret order he aspired to join. The price of admission was a constipation crisis in which his midnight screams startled the neighbors. All this to achieve entry into yet another brotherhood of disappointing secrets.

Did you wish to die of septic face blight?”

Sometimes the devil you know is bad enough to chance the one you don’t.