- iron filings to his magnet
- he has a french face, lean, whimsical, all planes and angles, with creases around the mouth where he smiles
- you can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself
- from the size of the jar you can tell how old it was when it foundered, inside her, flowed to its death
- his face is cut and bruised, deep reddish-brown bruises; the flesh is swollen and knobby, stubbled with unshaven beard. this doesn't look like a face but like an unknown vegetable, a mangled bulb or tuber, something that's grown wrong. even from where i'm standing i can smell him: he smells of shit and vomit.
- i don't want a man around, what use are they except for ten seconds' worth of half babies
- there must have been a chandelier, once. they've removed anything you could tie a rope to
- we walk, sedately
- heavy, formless, dark;
- an undercurrent of drums
- a revolving ball of mirrors, powdering the dancers with a snow of light
- we yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
- our voices soft and minor-key and mournful
- the threshold of a new house is a lonely place.
- not so her eyes, which were the flat hostile blue of a midsummer sky in bright sunlight, a blue that shuts you out.
- here and there are worms, evidence of the fertility of the soil, caught by the sun,half dead; flexible and pink, like lips.
- they haven't yet learned about existence through time.
- his skin is pale and looks unwholesomely tender, like the skin under a scab.
- there is more than one kind of freedom, said Aunt Ldyia. Freedom to and freedom from. in the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. now you are being given freedom from. don't underrate it.
- they wore blouses with buttons down the front that suggested the possibilities of the word undone
- we were a society dying, said Aunt Lydia, of too much choice.
- their very cheerfulness aggressive
- chatters at them in staccato
- when we think of the past its the beautiful things we pick out. We want to believe it was all like that.
- I would like to believe that this is a story i'm telling. i need to believe it. i must believe it. those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. if it's a story i'm telling then i have control over the ending. then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. i can pick up where i left off. it isn't a story i'm telling.
- the two others have purple placards hung around their necks: Gender Treachery. their bodies still wear the Guardian uniforms. Caught together, they must have been, but where? A barracks, a shower?
- Without a word she swivels, as if she's voice-activated, as if she's on little oiled wheels, as if she's on top of a music box. i resent this grace of hers. i resent her meek head, bowed as if into a heavy win. but there is no wind.
- the tulips along the border are redder than ever, opening, no longer winecups but chalices; thrusting themselves up, to what end? they are, after all, empty. when they are old they turn themselves inside out, then explode slowly, the petals thrown out like shards.
- the fresh towels ready for spoilage, the wastebaskets gaping their invitations, beckoning in the careless junk.
- old love; there's no other kind of love in this room now.
- is that how we lived then? but we lived as usual. everyone does, most of the time. whatever is going on is as usual. even this is as usual, now.
- we lived, as usual, by ignoring. ignoring isn't the same as ignorance, you have to work at it.
- the newspaper stories were like dreams to us, bad dreams dreamt by others. how awful, we would say, an they were, but they were awful without being believable. they were too melodramatic, they had a dimension that was not the dimension of our lives. we were the people who were not in the papers. we lived in the blank white spaces at the edges of print. it gave us more freedom. we lived in the gaps between the stories.
- his eyes are moist with compassion
- i don't want to look at something that determines me so completely.
- she comes back to me at different ages. This is how i know she's not really a ghost. if she were a ghost she would be the same age always.
- i wait. i compose myself. myself is a thing i must now compose, as one composes a speech. what i must present is a made thing, not something born.
- this is one of the things i wasn't prepared for - the amount of unfulfilled time, the long parenthesis of nothing.
nov 13 2018 ∞
nov 13 2018 +