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Sugar Land Quotes
Sugar Land
by
Tammy Lynne Stoner672 ratings, 3.96 average rating, 110 reviews
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Sugar Land Quotes
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“The thing my eyes settled on was the line in that letter that said: That this baby came from me has to be kept a secret.
A secret. I knew even then that secrets have a way of working themselves out of tight spots, of springing up somewhere else where the dirt is softer. Maybe since my secret didn’t see the light of day all those years ago, I passed it along to this child. I should have been honest and told people that once, back in 1923, I loved a girl who loved me back and it changed everything. I should have told her that, despite preferring the company of woman, I didn't live a false life with her Daddy—it was just like having hamburger when you want steak.
I should have said something.”
― Sugar Land
A secret. I knew even then that secrets have a way of working themselves out of tight spots, of springing up somewhere else where the dirt is softer. Maybe since my secret didn’t see the light of day all those years ago, I passed it along to this child. I should have been honest and told people that once, back in 1923, I loved a girl who loved me back and it changed everything. I should have told her that, despite preferring the company of woman, I didn't live a false life with her Daddy—it was just like having hamburger when you want steak.
I should have said something.”
― Sugar Land
“This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.’ Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendencies” as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas.
Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps.
The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.”
― Sugar Land
Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps.
The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.”
― Sugar Land
