When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

she thought vaguely but powerfully of time and change and tragedy and life and all the ways we hang on to these things, store them, and then take them out over the years to leaf through the memories in their pages.

I’ll always come when you need me.”

What he didn’t possess in inherent brilliance or revolutionary zeal he made up for in his simple understanding of people: their motivations, fears, and frustrations.

the stale, musty bedroom of an adolescent girl against the dignified office of a man who’d grown up to do exactly as he’d wished.

he’d gone to sleep with worry strapped to him like a dynamite vest, each of the worries packaged like a tiny bomb that he either had to snuff out or face the possibility of it blowing a hole through his heart

“That’s what it feels like to be a Black man in America, Winston. I’ve been on my belly for years, looking up from the ground, getting stepped on while I keep on crawling forward. The only difference between then and now is that I don’t have that one shot to look forward to.”

He was the kind of man who scared her, a man who acted like he had nothing to lose because he lived in a world without consequences.

You’re a soft-handed daddy’s boy who grew up with money and mistook it for brains.