Heart the Lover

by Lily King

He removes the fives, sixes, sevens, and eights from the deck and with the remaining cards explains that each suit is a family, every king the head of his family: Spade the Gardener, Club the Policeman, Heart the Lover, and Sir Hincomb Funnibuster, who is the king of diamonds.

I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.

‘We are all our sins remembered.’ ‘What the fuck, Sam. That’s Hamlet, not the Bible. And it’s a load of crap.’

These scenes that didn’t happen concentrate and distill the emotion of what did. ‘The truth has nothing to do with the facts,’ one of my professors said Faulkner said. Professor Felske shows me what that really means.

She never knew my boys, but she has helped me raise them.

As soon as his voice is gone I have that feeling I often have when I’m away from my family, like they are moving farther and farther away from me, beginning to flicker faintly as distant stars and I will never ever reach them again. It feels like a premonition of the fact that someday, one by one, we will be separated from each other forever.

I don’t want to dream. I remember feeling this way when my mother died. I was afraid of dreaming about her, afraid of seeing her alive and having to lose her all over again.