Buckeye

by Patrick Ryan

Now that we’ve just cracked your identity apart, let’s dive in. Whaa-whaa-whaa.

But it isn’t true. They lied about everything to make their own lives easier. With his body language, but also with what he tries to say, he lets them know that. Lets them know he thinks what they’ve done is an abuse of power. And hearing it hurts them, he can tell.

Who are they, to have decided it was better to lie to him than face their own fuckups?

Nothing is quite as maddening as being angry at people who lovingly understand your anger.

You know who apologizes? People who need to, for their own sake. People who are trying to do themselves a favor.

The world will always bring you back into perspective, if you only bother to let it.

For as much as he didn’t want to, Tom began to see his father’s reasoning for doing what he’d done. Or, at the very least, he saw that his father was convinced any other course of action would have been bad for the two of them.

Felix saw it so clearly: all we should ever want of time is more of it. Life was so simple when it was reduced to the barest of necessities:

They marveled at how they hadn’t emerged more scathed by the parents—or in Cal’s case, parent—who’d raised them.

But this younger generation wasn’t shy about rejecting what they perceived as broken systems. The world was already crowded with children and unstable.

Over and over, she’d learned that what the dead most often conveyed was love and forgiveness. She could only conclude that these were the two most important things in the world—so important that people carried them into the afterlife for the sole purpose of being able to hand them back to the living.

Those messages meant everything; they counterbalanced the world.

She didn’t even have to tell him, and he believed her. At the eleventh hour, when it mattered most.

Because he hadn’t been able to say he’d served in a war, that great marker of identity. But war had marked his father in a manner that had left him forever damaged, and it had wiped Skip’s mark away completely. They were the truncated ones—them