A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

by Anthony Marra

panic, he knew, could spread between two people more quickly than any virus.

Work isn’t meaningful just because you spend your life doing it.”

“Ibrahim’s willingness to sacrifice his son isn’t hard to believe. His son was an innocent. It’s so much harder when you know what your son would do to you if he survived. When you know just what would happen if an angel was to grab the knife from your hand.”

As a web is no more than holes woven together, they were bonded by what was no longer there.

Truth was only one among many hallucinations.

“My phantom hand is slapping you in the face.” “I can’t feel it,” she said, proudly. “Neither can I,” he said, glumly.

“A lizard fucks a crab and nine months later a turtle pops out. It’s called evolution.”

“I hide the toilet paper when my family visits so they won’t stay too long.”

There is something miraculous in the way the years wash away your evidence, first you, then your friends and family, then the descendants who remember your face, until you aren’t even a memory, you’re only carbon, no greater than your atoms, and time will divide them as well.”

“We know the meaning of nothing but the words we use to describe it.”

Life: a constellation of vital phenomena—organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, adaptation.

“You’re a decent man,” she said, and smiled. “A terrible physician, but a decent man.” “I know. I shouldn’t spend so much time with you. You’ll turn me into a first-rate surgeon and boor.”

“I’m overcome by the inexplicable desire to speak to you with common courtesy.”

“I don’t want to be excited,” Natasha said flatly. “I want boredom. I want to be lobotomized by boredom.”

Love, she learned, could reduce its recipient to an essential thing, as important as food or shelter, whose presence is not only longed for but needed.

If ever there was a season for constipation it was winter.

A meteorologist might beg to differ, but weather prediction was an act of infidel witchcraft that could not be trusted.

How often is immense unhappiness mistaken for courage?

“I must have lived a thousand lives before this. I was a bird. I was a bug. I lived in the leaves. I don’t know which life is the hallucination.”

Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.

“None of us is bound to anyone by so trivial a distinction. Do you think paternity even matters? No, Father, no. We are the children of wolves. That’s all, Father. He could be your son, your brother, your nephew, your neighbor, your friend, and I wouldn’t save him.” “And yet you save me. What a waste.”

You are mine. I recognize you. We twist our souls around each other’s miseries. It is that which makes us family.

There are no characteristics to distinguish the cranium of a cannibal from that of an ordinary man.

but nothing, she now knew, could be defined in exclusion, and every bug, pencil, and grass blade was a dictionary in itself, requiring the definitions of all other things to fulfill its own.

“Medical miracles are the only miracles most of us will ever see.”

God, like everything kind and good, lived in London.

Akhmed’s head hummed with the shock of how not shocked he was.

She wanted to hold foreign syllables like mints on her tongue until they dissolved into fluency.

In four brothels she had met every shape of desperation God had given testicles, and the only men she couldn’t forget were those who needed to impart pain rather than receive pleasure.

To live with dignity meant a premature death.

A one-way sign pointed to the sky.