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“Shit’ll fly, if ye hit it with a stick,” Kildare reminded us.
Connell raised a ginger eyebrow at me as if demanding to know what abominable alchemy had created my only sibling and what in bloody hell we were doing with our lives.
“Dry up, bright young copper star. I said yet. Meanwhile, Symmes is an ambulatory sack of mouse droppings and a goddamn Hunker to boot.”
Terrible, I’ve always thought it, the way fierce enough love can make the future seem to ripple with nightmare.
you are being a blue-ribbon horse’s arse.
“Holy Lord, what do you mean why, you limp-wristed tit?”
Love, I thought, is extremely unhealthy.
“I was heading for the Knickerbocker and saw the commotion,” I explained. “You look like a warmish stiff.” “And you look like a stunted puppy with a face fit to turn milk into cheese,” he snapped.
That’s my brother—built like a Pygmy, but that lad could have you flat on the ground before you so much as saw him make a fist. So miniature idiot or fluff-brained little dandelion or even the memorable thimbleful of shit wouldn’t have even merited a blink on my part.
Val sprawled in a leather armchair opposite, being about as helpful as a genital rash.
“Your cock in his arse is irrelevant to his being a sodomite, of course. You probably didn’t mean to put it there. You tripped, and Jim was strategically posed.”
“Oh! Mr. Wilde,” Madam Marsh said to me affectionately. “Apologies, I didn’t see you behind so large a desk.” My eyes didn’t so much as lift from the page.
But the inadequacy of gestures, I realized with his coat between my fingers, was a petty and cowardly reason not to make them in the first place.
I’d long supposed the only fatal flames to be the physical variety—the sort that destroyed my parents, ruined my livelihood, snuffed the life from the stargazers trapped in the Pell Street tinderbox. But there are plentiful killing phrases, I was learning, words that sear a man and leave snakelike scars, I’d been an idiot not to realize it, and whether we’re perishing instantly or by inches, the results are the same. The worst death New Yorkers have ever managed to come up with is slow burning, a fate reserved for rebellious black rioters and traitors to the natural order. And I have said I
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The pair of us would live for as long as we could. As well as we could. That was all. Then we’d blow away like wishes made on dandelion heads.
Love like a weight in my chest, a painful press of devotion.
Time is a tyrant, words our last and only weapons.
