Cinders and Sparrows

by Stefan Bachmann

I always felt I could trust worried, anxious people more than brash ones. Those who strode through life too bravely always struck me as either foolishly unaware of the world’s terrors, or else frighteningly powerful and immune to them, neither of which I found endearing.

Because in the end, we’re all only pretending to be the things people think we are, or pretending to be something else, or looking like a marble bust, when really we’re not a marble bust at all.”

“You know, terrible things mostly happen when people don’t speak of things. It’s almost always better in the long run to say things rather than to not say things.”

It was easy to begin things, easy to end them too, but to make everything in between make sense . . . that was the challenge.

“One spares oneself all sorts of troubles by dying,” Mrs. Cantanker had said once, and Magdeboor had said it too, and they were each just as wrong as the other. One simply lost all the chances one might have had, and skipped all the paths one might have taken.

I’d take the troubles. I’d gather them in my arms and pile them onto my back until I was doubled over like a tinker, and in the meantime I’d see the sun in the puddles, and the flowers growing along the ditch.

great big heap on my back would turn into a light as bright as a dozen lanterns, and I’d carry it across the marshes into whatever lay beyond. I was not afraid of life.