When you're a kid, it's hard to tell the innocuous secrets from the ones that will kill you if you keep them.
karen-russell
There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.
If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don't go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It's stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.
I swim with all my strength. No superhuman surge, or pony heroics; it's just me at my most desperate.
I could have warned her. If we were back home, and Mirabella had come under attack by territorial beavers or snow-blind bears, I would have warned her. But the truth is that by Stage 3 I wanted her gone. Mirabella's inability to adapt was taking a visible toll. Her teeth were ground down to nubbins; her hair was falling out... Her ribs were poking through her uniform. Her bright eyes had dulled to a sour whiskey color. But you couldn't show Mirabella the slightest kindness anymore-she'd never leave you alone!
karen-russell girls-raised-by-wolves st-lucys-home
It's go time.' He takes my elbow and gentles me down the planks with such tenderness that I am suddenly very afraid. But there's no sense making the plunge slow and unbearable. I take a running leap down the pier-.. -and launch over the water. It's my favorite moment: when I'm one toe away from flight and my body takes over. The choice is made, but the consequence is still just an inky shimmer beneath me. And I'm flying, I'm rushing to meet my own reflection-
Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he's become tight-lipped as an oyster. But he can feel the worlds pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.
In the beginning, fifty hours sounded like a bleak ocean of time, more hours than Sawtooth wanted to spend with himself, let alone with another person. Now he the girl to sit and measure time with him, the way the neighbor woman needs her prescription mirror so that she doesn't forget her own face.
Etiquette was so confounding in this country. Still, looking at Mirabella-her fists balled together like small, white porcupines, her brows knitted in animal confusion-I felt a throb of compassion. I wondered. Then I congragulated myself. This was a Stage 3 thought.
Any place, then, can become a cemetery. All it takes is your body. It's not fair, I think, and I get this petulant wish for ugly flowers and mourners, my mother's old familiar grief. Somebody I love to tend my future grave. Probably this is the wrong thing to be wishing for.
karen-russell accident-brief occurrence-00-422
My voice rises like a hand struggling to break the surface of that water. I wonder if it's like this for Rangi, too; if Rangi's mutism just means that he has sunk several fathoms farther down than the rest of us, and given up on swimming.
Rangi doesn't look happy; his face is still a mask of old fury. I wonder what it feels like to be angry at everyone except for a dead bear. It scares me to think about it. I picture the dead bear loping and slathering forever inside of Rangi, a long-toothed loyal animal, his one memory of love. Digger Gibson should never have adopted him. Who wants salvation when it just orphans you futher?
Anger flames through me and my muscles tense to hit him, a violence that clenches once and then vanishes. My fists uncurl wihtout my conscious intervention. I stare down at my open palms with real surprise, feeling shaky and defeated. It's as if my body knows before I do that it's too dangerous to feel this way towards Rangi. Right now, he's the only other human around for thousands of vertical miles.
My voice is cracking. It suffers up and fails and surges again. It breaks eons before the ice ever will. Now I'm breathless and covered in freezing spittle. Rangi watches and never even opens his mouth.
In a few minutes, the town will stand up and applaud. I feel as if I'm looking down at my own funeral, only nobody knows that I'm dead. It's a frightening, lonely feeling.
Could we betray our parents by going back to them?
I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot, but I'd seen what happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn't like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home.
Behind us, Brauser is moaning. His cries swell and sky-crawl. It's a wordless sound, a wild sound, this animal pain that can't be haltered and led to meaning... This is the worst sound, I think, the very worst sound in the whole world. Then the moaning stops. Brauser's movement stops. And I regret all my hastier judgments. Any sound is better than this.
The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.
On Sundays, the pretending felt almost as natural as nature. The chapel was our favorite place. Long before we could understand what the priest was saying, the music instructed us in how to feel.
We sang at the chapel annexed to the home every morning. We understood that this was the humans' moon, the place for howling beyond purpose. Not for mating, not for hunting, not for fighting, not for anything but the sound itself. And we'd howl along with the choir, hurling every pitted thing within us at the stained glass.
I ignored her and continued down the hall. I had only four more hours to perfect the Sausalito. I was worried only about myself. By that stage, I was no longer certain of how the pack felt about anything.
The brothers didn't smell like our brothers anymore. They smelled like pomade and cold, sterile sweat. They looked like little boys. Someone had washed behind their ears and made them wear suspendered dungarees. Kyle used to be a blustery alpha male, chewing through rattlesnakes, spooking badgers, snatching a live trout out of a grizzly's mouth. He stood by the punch bowl, looking pained and out of place.
One Sunday, near the end of my time at St. Lucy's, the sisters gave me a special pass to go visit the parents... We crunched through the fall leaves in silence, and every step made me sadder.
The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
Showing 1 to 25 of 68 results
You must log in to post a comment.
There are no comments yet.