Twist

by Colum McCann

There was something very calm and unrushed about him. If there was a clock inside him, instructing time, it was ticking slower than the timepieces inside the rest of us. It wasn’t that he tamped down the moment, or tightened it, or obscured it. On the contrary, he gave air to it, let it hover,

Say nothing, I told myself. I let the sunlight put a hand over my mouth.

so simultaneously happy and sad that I thought, at times, she might burst into flames.

“In the end I think he was just trying to find a way to get by. He was quite simple. In the best sense, I mean. He liked the world. He just couldn’t hold on. It was all so stupid, the world, but it mattered too. Still does.”