Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

The Beginning of the End can feel a lot like the middle when you are living in it.

You can’t forbid love to anybody. Forbidding is just stoking the flames. You can’t boss love, kids.”

Hopes were wallflowers. Hopes hugged the perimeter of a dance floor in your brain, tugging at their party lace, all perfume and hems and doomed expectation. They fanned their dance cards, these guests that pressed against the walls of your heart.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything. “Okay,

That one got me.

Death is a theft, a crime, a cry in the sky,

This

Life was a phonograph in an empty room. The World was a silent record, turning. Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.

The yellow inside you that makes you want to live.