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his concentration clumsy and honest, like a child gluing two pieces of paper together.
Life is suffering—it really is. The Buddhists are right about that one, I tell you. Nothing is easy on this earth.
The room was all white and gray and the air was warm and the air hung on me and I hung in this flesh that all those unknown centuries of blood that had brought into being. I had to tend to this flesh as if it were an honest gift, as if it had all been worth it. Why did living feel so invisibly brief and unbearably long at once?
half-sensed he wanted to frighten me, but I was not afraid—after all the moon was here, calm night, warm and easy air, and all of it was ours.
Keep to yourself, don’t you, kid? Always been just the opposite myself. Can’t keep my durn mouth shut and looks like I never will.
Resting on that table, not getting undressed, not putting on the paper gown, I feared I’d become something sacrificial, but I would not lay myself out on this altar. Whatever else I may have been, I was, I knew, not theirs.
I don’t mean to be so negative. I know that’s not what people like. Sometimes it’s just hard to really think about your life, all the years of it you can’t take back, to think about what it is.
There’s all sorts of things a person can’t know till it’s too late.
Glad about someone’s suffering because at least it ain’t your own.
Hello, Mr. Kercher said, stooping to pet a pile of green moss. He looked at the moss the way I’d seen people look at children or babies sleeping in strollers, soft bodies someone larger had to protect.
I know what I am. The body is already dead.
One time he read a bunch of poems to a package of ground beef on the kitchen counter. Another time he told me he could hear the voices of the dead, people and animals, and they all spoke the same language.
Did she feel she’d wronged or been wronged more in her life? Did anyone ever know which was true? How much harm did we cause without knowing it? How much harm did we cause when we were certain we were doing such good?
