Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

She’s twelve, she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time.

“You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”

“I’m just trying to say I don’t understand why I don’t feel the way other people seem to feel.” “About what?” “About everything. Anything.”

Her daughter looks her right in the eyes—an absolute rarity since her first menstrual cycle six years ago—and her gaze is hopeless and yearning in the same breath. For a moment, Mary Pat sees herself in the gaze . . . but what self? Which Mary Pat? How long since she yearned? How long since she dared believe something so foolish as the idea that someone anywhere has the answers to questions she can’t even put into words?

Someone told me—I can’t even tell ya who, some guy—the pot roast wasn’t as good here anymore, and I thought, I can’t fucking take this. I can’t.”

They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.

The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void.

Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

“People should be left to themselves.”

Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

“Faith.” “In God?” he asks. “People,” she says.

He feels, at his essence, that he is a baby who was dropped by a stork and is still falling toward a chimney. Everything else he shows to the world is costume.

We’re not one thing. We’re people.

you should be able to remember the last words you ever said to someone.

life in all its highs and lows, all its dashed dreams and surprising joys, its little tragedies and minor miracles.