The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 8

by Beth Brower

Music might balance the melancholy of a damp, isolated day.

He played as if he dared not allow the looseness of the June woodland to steal the notes before he claimed them his own.

not everything in an unspoken past can remain in the dark. Some things are too damaging not to come to light, despite a painful sun.

For a different tragedy, a different broken past had come roaring into the present, consuming everything.

Other mysteries were to be held at bay. Other sorrows were to wait.

I answered at length, stepping around the words like they were shattered glass.

What penance do I pay for catching you in my storm?”

Cruelty played out over years, and a feeling of desolation and ash in its wake. Human brutality carries its own sting.

How tangibles and intangibles held us together. How palpable the reality of life that something might crash through and change everything forever.

life does not play lightly with its human pieces.”

“A friend should bear his friend’s infirmities,”

Her words came like a spear thrown of necessity by a regretful soldier,

Night silence in the country is louder than one remembers. An owl’s call, insects, the sound of leaves rustling. And when one is hiding in shrubbery, one’s heart trammels and the air in and out of one’s lungs is like the east wind.

(The lot of the eavesdropper is a heavy one.

We stood there a moment, a breeze promising a clouded afternoon.

Maggie Revel can twist a room around her finger and spin it like a plate.

Forced couture is a far cry from chosen attitude of style,

She eyed my ensemble—as if I were a dead rat—and looked back up at my face.

“You are odious and fascinating, by turns. I don’t know which carries more weight.”

I gave her answer no response, but a good deal of internal thought.

Her freedom would always come at the cost of someone else’s liberty.

An unobtrusive confirmation of the significance of an old connection valued by a new?

We had all been given secrets to keep and we were keeping them.

One should go away long enough to know the cotton-soft contentment of coming home.

Meaning is the question wise men have asked through all the ages.