Pew

by Catherine Lacey

It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

if you are ever so tired that you feel nothing but the animal weight of your bones,

It seems people have a lot of reasons for entering a church and perhaps even more reasons for leaving one,

What I mean is a church is a structure with walls and a roof and pretty windows that make it so you can’t see outside. They’re like casinos in that way, or shopping malls or those big drugstores with all the aisles, music piped in from somewhere, the endless search for that final thing.

I miss that kind of beginning, being given another day, taking another day, something that’s yours, only yours, only yours and everyone else’s.

all the answers were here and we could all just accept them, roll over and accept them like a sleeping body accepts air.

I saw someone was carrying that wet baby, carrying it away, a limp human that belonged to whoever could carry it.

Her attention was turned inward and outward like a tightrope walker.

It seemed she must have wanted something more than to just find him, and it seemed to me that a person might have many reasons, many many reasons, to not Come Home.

There were many kinds of insects, I knew—I had seen many of them—but how many kinds of respect existed?

My whole family was killed in the name of God and now these people want me to sing a hymn like it was all some kind of misunderstanding.

Steven wrapped a hand around one of her wrists, which seemed to end something in her.

In her eyes I could see an intricate calculation was always passing through her mind.

But we’ve always been fair to people according to what the definition of fair was at the time.

Hell

Bless her. The bitch. I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, I know, but … well, people shouldn’t speak ill of their own children either. I suppose I—well, I guess I disappointed her too much and she didn’t live long enough to burn off all that disappointment.

Did you have parents or just some people who thought they should own somebody?

Well. It’s overrated, family. You’re lucky if you get born into one where you belong. It’s really a lot more rare than people want to say.

Too much light will blind you and too much water will drown you. It is a danger to accept anything real from another person, to know something of them. A person has to be careful about the voices they listen to, the faces they let themselves see.

But what about when you lose someone who is still alive? When you lose track of the person you know within a person they’ve become—what kind of grief is that?

They have heard their desire to hear something, and desire always speaks the loudest.

the only thing I can see that a belief in divinity makes possible in this world is a right toward cruelty—the belief in an afterlife being the real life … not here. People need a sense of righteousness to take things from others … to carry out violence. Divinity gives them that.

They laughed like a herd of something running.

Sometimes I think that nobody is just one person, that actually we’re a bunch of different people and we have to figure out how to get them all to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that we’re just one person, even though everybody else is doing the same thing.

Miss Goodson, this is very troubling, and I said, Because I want people to be treated the same, and she said something about how ideas were dangerous and I really needed someone to talk some sense into me before it got worse and this is not how the world works and I said that I knew that wasn’t how the world works but it was how I think the world should work, then she wrote me up for talking back.

It just seems to me that part of some people having a lot of things depends on other people having less things.

People cannot be kept waiting. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck. Sometimes one of us will hold the other by the neck and no one will do anything about it for many years, so many lifetimes of necks being held. I know what I am. The body is already dead.

I hadn’t needed even to be born here because I had always been here; I hadn’t needed to be born at all. I didn’t say that either. I didn’t say anything.

Now, I don’t mean for that to sound ugly, and I ain’t trying to be ugly to you. No one here is trying to be ugly, but we just—we never had this sort of issue before.

And a few years back all the preachers in town got together for a meeting because it was starting to feel like the whole country was particularly angry, and people were always accusing each other, and whole groups of people start blaming whole other groups of people for their problems—blacks and immigrants, for instance, and women, of course—but I’ll admit that, in some ways, it goes the other direction, too, I suppose.

He was so frail but the hospital wouldn’t take him because I didn’t have the right insurance—imagine not helping a sick child because of some damn paperwork

He said it was larger and harder to believe, that he had begun to think you couldn’t even love just one person more than someone else, that you couldn’t prefer one community over another one, that you couldn’t believe in one country over another one, that you couldn’t even prefer your own by-blood family—that the family you were born into didn’t mean anything, that you couldn’t even have a name.

A word is put down as a placeholder for something that cannot be communicated, no matter what anyone tries, no matter how many words accumulate, there is always that absence.

It can’t scare you if you know it’s going to happen.

the older you get, the more you see how certainty depends on one blindness or another.

Forgiveness is sometimes just a costume for forgetting.

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?

A town has a feeling, I remembered someone telling me long ago, because certain kinds of thought are contagious.