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“You ever fired one of these?” asked Sarge, though I think he knew the answer. “Why do I need to know how to shoot?” I asked. “If it comes to that, I’m dead.” “We’ll practice how you properly shoot yourself in the head in a few minutes,” Sarge said, and he was deadly serious. “But for now let’s work on how you might defend yourself before it comes to that.” He sent one of the paper targets out about five meters.
“Why are you closing your left eye?” Sarge asked. “To see better.” “You see better with one eye shut?”
All thoughts that this might be bluster evaporated as he sent three rounds into a tightly packed cluster clean through the target’s head. “Tell you what,” Sarge said, turning to me. “If you need to get yourself shot in the head, have him do it for you.”
Don’t try to put out a fire by throwing on more fire.
He’d been an honest man. Here was the upside-down nature of the system: you could only be trusted if you were corrupt. It was the honest ones who had problems.
If my brother’s plunge into the Swedish pool has been deeper and fuller than my own, he has never matched my gift for that most Swedish of pastimes: passive-aggressive silence.
the décor was Scandinavian minimalism with a health care twist, which is to say: Värboca Phase 2 was a Persian version of hell.
Rivka laughed—it was the first time I’d heard one from her, and it was more delicate, hesitant, than I’d expected. I suppose she didn’t have much practice.
“I’d like to live my life with death at the end, where it belongs, not jammed into everything else, too. It’s exhausting.
Kam is losing the bigger battles, why lose the small ones too? You can’t win, but it’s an option not to lose.
But truthfulness was a habit Glitzman embraced at home, not for ethical reasons, but for the coldly practical: he wished to stay married.
Whatever was flickering my soul to life did not come cheap. Love comes with a knife, my mother would say, reading to me from one of her worn collections of Rūmī. It seems free, too good to be true—and it is.
