Lanny

by Max Porter

Someone said to my mother once when she was very young that she couldn’t hold a tune. So she never sang or whistled in her life. I can’t sing, she’d say.

The type of person who is that little bit more akin to the weather than most people, more obviously made of the same atoms as the earth than most people these days seem to be.

This is what commuting is. Small pleasures coaxed from playing the routine like a game.

Such burdens are always hers.

I’m a million cameras, even when I’m sleeping, clicking, clicking, every second something is growing and changing. We are little arrogant flashes in a grand magnificent scheme.

The smell of metal lingers on my lips and on my fingers.

Which do you think is more patient, an idea or a hope?

I can’t imagine this boy becoming a man.

Beauty is what, my semi-synthetic friend? Illness, decay and exploitation? A tapestry of small abuses, fights and littering, lake-loads of unready chemicals piped into my water bed, greed and decline, preaching teaching crying dying and walking the fucking dogs, breeding and needing and working and …

One day as good as any in the human war against others.

I’ll tell you something interesting that you may already know from your reading. The bit of a tree that draws up nutrients, the most vital living part of a tree, is actually just under the surface. So a skin wound, a minor whack with an axe or an arrow or a chainsaw, can do a lot of damage to a tree, to its living operations. It grows around that damage. I know what you’re going to say, replies Lanny. You do, do you? He stands up and stretches to the ceiling, ribs and tum, reaching like a sweet pea for the sun. That humans are just the same.

you cannot fix the way the world is broken all on your own.

Because Dad’s parents are dead do you think he loves us more? Do you think he gives us the spare love he would normally give his mum and dad? Is there extra love for us?

I did not know myself. I did not know what on earth I was.

What if we said what we really felt? What if one said what one really felt?

None of us actually feel anything for anyone else. It’s all pretend.

and she realises their life at home, his time at school, what she thought of as his real existence, was only a place he visited.