Charles’s Reviews > Housekeeping > Status Update

If my family were not as intelligent as we were pleased to pretend, this was an innocent deception, for it was a matter of indifference to everybody whether we were intelligent or not.

The rising of the spring stirred a serious, mystical excitement in him, and made him forgetful of her. He would pick up eggshells, a bird's wing, a jawbone, the ashy fragment of a wasp's nest. He would peer at them as if he could read them, and pocket them as if he could own them. This is death at my hand, this is ruin in my breast pocket, where I keep my reading glasses.