Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

“You are a mousetrap of a friend, all soft cheese and hard springs.”

Men died with their gaze open to heaven and sand accruing on their eyes.

That every eligible person could die with the same baffled expression that he had seen on the first dead of the war, in those earliest shocking days before the men had learned to expect it. I’m so sorry—I think I am actually hit.

Even as she railed, a hollow feeling grew that perhaps life would turn out to be like this. Not, after all, the effortful ascent to grace that she had imagined, but rather a gradual accretion of weight and complexity—and not in one great mass that could be shouldered as Atlas had, but in many mundane and antiheroic fragments with a collective tendency to drag one down to the mean.

brought in something that the cook had made out of bread crumbs and canned malevolence.

One does not rise above the everyday simply because one ought to.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel.