The Mighty Red

by Louise Erdrich

And so love dies, Crystal thought, pulled down to earth by the tedious weight of a partner’s habits.

Practically everything she and the Geists did, and even her mother’s job, was destroying what she had just witnessed, the joinery of creation.

One thing he especially liked about the beetles was that they controlled the weeds but never quite ate all of the spurge, never ate themselves entirely out of existence. They weren’t like people. They respected their existential limits.

‘Suicide always leaves someone else holding your pain,’ said Ichor. ‘There’s no reasoning out what happened, Gary, why the ice was rotten right there. You’ll never get an answer.’

The cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.