I Cheerfully Refuse

by Leif Enger

thanks to her mother, a profligate reader and purveyor of impertinent ideas.

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.

“How do you do, and where have you come from?” she inquired, just as if she were a Narnian or a whimsical rabbit drawn in pencil.

He was good at seeing how things were and how they ought to be.

I was ready to tolerate chickens again if we could eat more omelets.

He ended with a quote from Molly Thorn about the soul that knows itself “and knowing, spends it freely.”

That first warm hour in the pleasant tavern would return to me in dreams.

I did remember the sardines. Got them out, opened both tins—miraculous shiny small fish—piled them on crackers, and ate with preposterous satisfaction.

You know how hunger will plant in your mind some very specific item?

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

I didn’t want to shake it but I did—an antique custom in this germy century of ours.

Probably doomed and perplexingly merry, was a concise report of our handmade lives.

Rubicons get crossed for all kinds of petty reasons.

Nothing brings rage like humiliation.

“Maybe he’ll be back. Home is a powerful draw.”

When I asked about the promised war and how we ought to get ready, she pulled the car over and looked in my eyes. Her kindness was like water over smooth stones. 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.

My kingdom for a window.

I’d forgotten the way a migraine smells, like cheese sweating in a warm room.

“Sleep, soap, or a meal, what would you all like first?”

greedy for the dullest lives a human could invent.

Girard gave me free rein with his personal library, but then, as book people will, kept pulling his own darlings off the shelf and stuffing them into my hands.