In his mind, Inman likened the swirling paths of vulture flight to the coffee grounds seeking pattern in his cup. Anyone could be oracle for the random ways things fall against each other. It was simp...
There in the highlands, clear weather held for much of the time. The air lacked its usual haze, and the view stretched on and on across rows of blue mountains, each paler than the last until the final...
You try your best to love the world despite obvious flaws in design and execution and you take care of whatever needy things present themselves to you during your passage through it. Otherwise you're...
Still, Luce held firm to the belief that quiet and solitude were good for you, offering peace, or at least hope for peace.
But Luce takes the attitude, when you start fretting the day-by- day you lose track of the long view. And the long view is, they need to learn to speak for themselves and do the best they can. For now...
From inside the tavern came the sounds of a fiddle being tuned, various plucks and tentative bowings, then a slow and groping attempt at Aura Lee, interrupted every few notes by unplanned squeaks and...
The father let his rifle down and stood its butt against the porch boards. The boy, though, kept alert. There was a good deal of killer about him, and it was why he still lived. The last four years ha...
Had she been an old woman who long ago in her youth sang beautifully, one might have said that she had learned to use the diminished nature of her voice to maximum effect, that it was a lesson in how...
… she claimed it’s a sign of God’s mercy that He won’t let us remember the reddest details of pain. He knows the parts we can’t bear and won’t let our minds render them again. In time, from disuse, th...
Back then, he'd have to leave at the end of August for the start of school, so the week before Labor Day became it's own tiny season of gloom, like a hundred Sunday nights crowded together.
Literacy: Blessing? Or curse?
Needing and getting don’t seem likely to match up any time soon... What needs doing is mine to do.
Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.
And she [Ada] thought momentarily that she ought to worry about losing her beauty, about having become brown and stringy and rough. And then she thought that you went on living one day after another,...
A man's spirit could be torn apart and cease and yet his body keep on living...His spirit blasted away so that he had become lonesome and estranged from all around him...It seemed a poor swap to find...
How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we're mostly high-pitched and crazy. All urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And th...
She always carried a book, though, in case she needed to read a few pages to avoid unwanted conversation.
Luce's new stranger children were small and beautiful and violent.
That's just pain she said. It goes eventually. And when it's gone, there's no lasting memory. Not the worst of it anyway. It fades. Our minds aren't made to hold on to the particulars of pain the way...
He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret.
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