The worst part is that Wallow just watches me impassively, his cast held aloft in the air, as if he were patiently waiting to ask the universe a question. He nudges the goggles towards me with his foot.
Karen Russell
I had been eagerly waiting just such a disaster. Storms, wolves, snakebite, floods-these are the occasions to find out how your father sees you, how strong and necessary he thinks you are.
karen-russell
There's something pitiable and terrifying about the unconscious bully. His crumpled nose and hat.. This is the first true thing that Brauser and I have ever shared, this fear, besides dog-eared songbooks and cafeteria noodles.I wonder, briefly, if I could eat Brauser if it came to that. At this point, we have been alone on the glacier for fourteen minutes.
karen-russell accident-brief occurrence-00-422
Pupils expanding, pupils contracting. A dark blue ring around the world. In between breaths I realize that something incredible is happening at this new elevation. Up here you can hear everything-the orange of light on metal, the purr of water melting. These blue ocean contractions in Brauser's eyes. His pupils make a faint tidal ing. Shadows sound like feed pouring out of a cloth sack. When I move my hand, millions of shadow grains bounce along the hard snow. That's my sound, I think, birdseed raining out of a sack. It shakes out across the empty snowfields. I look up at the sky, nervous. What sort of bird, I wonder, is my shadow designed to be food for?Above us, the sun bounces orange and yellow. The silence changes. We bump noses, but I can't hear Brauser's eyes anymore, or his shadow. I tug his hat down harder. Rangi's air pulses red like a swallow's breast. Brauser's quiet is coma white. My own silence hums with these black-and-yellow bee stripes of fear.
My fingers curl through the holes in the wicker, through the wet grass beneath it, trying to hold tight to the sharp blades of the present. Somewhere in my brain a sinkhole is bubbling over, and each bubble contains a scene from a tiny sunken world.. I have never been the prophet of my own past before. It makes me wonder how the healthy dreamers can bear to sleep at all, if sleep means that you have to peer into that sinkhole by yourself... I had almost forgotten this occipital sorrow, the way you are so alone with the things you see in dreams.
Far away, I can hear Mouflon, our last sheep, bleating in the dark. I wonder if Annie is still out to protect her, still scouring the woods in barefoot pursuit of those dogs. I feel sorry for Annie, alone with a rabid pack of her own delusions. I feel sorrier for Mouflon. She's alone with Annie.
I haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters.
My hand hovers above the doorknob. I stand there, a thin wire of fear spooling in my gut, until I can't stay in the empty house any longer. And I'd be tempted to tell Ms. Huerta that is the feeling that separates us from the animals, if I hadn't seen so many of the Chief's dogs die of loneliness.
I wish I could say I gulp pure courage as I run, like those brave little girls you read about in stories,.. But this burst of speed comes from an older adrenaline, some limbic other. Not courage, but a deeper terror. I don't want to be left alone. And I am ready to defend Ossie against whatever monster I encounter,.. And save her for myself.
Granana lives on the other side of the island. She's eighty-four, I'm twelve, and Wallow's fourteen, so it's a little ambiguous as to who's babysitting whom.
Sometimes I think Ogli and I must be like imperfect antennae, the distress signals traveling like light from dead stars.I guess it wouldn't be so bad, if the dreams didn't have the fated, crimson-tinged horror of prophecy. Or if I could forget them before waking. It's that dread, half-second lapse in the morning that gets me, when time's still just a jumble of tenses at the foot of the bed. I start awake with the certainty that I can actually do something to prevent disaster... Between the dying echo of a dream explosion and my conscious brain reassuring me, like an alarm bell ringing in a pile of rubble.
I think, a deafening, echoing thought. It roars around me, the new solitude within my own skull. And I am angry, so angry at Ogli, for his forgetting. It's worse, somehow, that it wasn't deliberate, that the dream sickness just left him like a fever lifting. It means I don't even get to hate him. Ogli gets to wake up to cheery blankness and cereal, and I'll spend the rest of my life counting dead sheep.. All that happy fear has ebbed out of me. The leaves sound like leaves; the lake looks glassy and flat.
I pace along the edge of the marsh, too afraid to follow her, not for the first time. This is it, this is the geographical limit of how far I'll go for Ossie. We are learning latitude and longitude in school, and it makes my face burn that I can graph the coordinates of my own love and courage with such damning precision.
We keep giggling, happy and nervous, tickled by an incomplete innocence. We both sense that some dark joke is being played on us, even if we can't quite grasp the punch line.
My dad's version of the book,.. Is nearly identical, except that the graphics are a matte black, and the same information is listed as Fact #47. I guess that's what growing up means, at least according to the publishing industry: phosphorescence fades to black and white, and facts cease to be fun.
Showing 46 to 60 of 68 results
You must log in to post a comment.
There are no comments yet.