The Largesse of the Sea Maiden

by Denis Johnson

Some of us hadn’t realized that Chris had lost a leg. He limped, but only slightly. I didn’t even know he’d fought in Afghanistan. “A land mine?” I said. “Yes, sir. A land mine.” “Can we see it?” Deirdre said. “No, ma’am,” Chris said. “I don’t carry land mines around on my person.” “No! I mean your leg.” “It was blown off.” “I mean the part that’s still there!” “I’ll show you,” he said, “if you kiss it.”

How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation?

You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away.

I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it.

But did you ever think that maybe there actually is a devil and he actually does get his claws in certain people and they actually do get dragged through the garbage of an evil life on their way to actually going to hell?

She said, Your father rose a little bit above my origins But I sank you all back down to my level

That’s what we gotta do is get down to just one story, the true person we are, and live it all the way out.

I hear the Devil laughing, and I hear him ordering me to kill people. Don’t worry, he’s been running me all my life but he can’t tell me straight out what to do, there’s no way I would ever take a direct order from anybody, that’s why I never went into the military.

I passed a scene of carnage: half a dozen redheaded vultures on the ground, beleaguering a carcass too small to be seen in their midst. When we catch sight of one of these birds balanced and steering on the currents, its five-pound body effortlessly carried by the six-foot span of its wings and therefore not quite constituting a material fact, the earthbound soul forgets itself and follows after, suddenly airborne, but when they’re down here with the rest of us, desecrating a corpse, brandishing their wings like the overlong arms of chimpanzees, bouncing on the dead thing, tearing at it, their nude red heads looking imbecilically minuscule and also, to a degree, obscene—isn’t it sad? By

It doesn’t matter. The world keeps turning. It’s plain to you that at the time I write this, I’m not dead. But maybe by the time you read it.