Unlikely Animals

by Annie Hartnett

We see and hear it all in Everton, one of the perks of being dead, omniscience within town limits. It’s a little frustrating how the living come and go, but we always get the full story eventually.

but sometimes it’s good to be absorbed in the thoughts of a dog.

It’s unfair how the body crumbles while the soul still lives in it.

When you consider that men have been getting further away from nature for decades, wearing fine clothes and living in cities, it all seems a horrid mistake. It will remain for this generation to see in some measure the folly of this, and to seek a return to the soil.

We don’t know if there’s anything after this. Maybe nothing. Maybe this patch of dirt and grass and ice and snow is all there is.

many of us have thought a lot about that ever since, if we’re still human or if we’re something else.

The hero can’t die, at least not until the very end of the story.

Emma might die...

that was when Clive Starling felt it keenly: he really was losing it. It was terrifying, so much was the same as always, and yet so much had changed, had been rattled around.

a poet loves anything that better illuminates the daily horror of being alive.

The Meriden College students who hailed from the manicured suburbs of New York and Connecticut and New Jersey were always impressed.

People talk a lot about first loves, or the love of your life, but people don’t say as much about the friend of your life.

You spend years thinking that you’re the golden girl, and you find out that you’re a giant grouper. A big ugly fish.

“I would say yes, Aug, I absolutely would, but if you haven’t noticed, I’m dying.”

Anticipatory grief, it’s called, when you’re sad about something that hasn’t happened yet. Oh man, we thought at Maple Street, how we missed the excruciating pain of being alive.

We’d love to be hugged again, but we can’t quite re-create the sensation in our minds. A hug must be so comforting, we think, and warm.

No one ever stops loving their high school best friend, no matter how we lose them. Some of us at Maple Street had lost our childhood best friends to world wars, to polio, to childbirth, to other violent ends, or just to plain old boring time and separation, but we’d all taken a piece of that love to the grave. That first love. It had shaped us all.

You’re not too messed up at all. You’re just as messed up as you should be.”

those four words—“I’m proud of you”—outrank “I love you” in terms of how much we need to hear them, especially from our parents.

It would be so great if you really felt like there was someone out there who listened to your bargains, your pleas, your promises to yourself. Like someone somewhere was keeping a lookout. We’re here, we told her, as we often did.

“Jimmie,” I called. “Jimmie, old friend, hello!” The bear stood up on his hind legs and looked at me with a puzzled expression which seemed to say: It seems to me that I have met you somewhere before, but I’ll be hanged if I can remember where.

a pure natural world left only for the millionaires.

That’s why we like living with animals so much; they exhibit their joy so outwardly, remind us how to be better alive.