|
d51d2ad
|
The game lasts twenty seconds, tops. You don't want to come all that way and miss the game.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
aa3b12d
|
At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
7afc4a6
|
He was intelligent and healthy, but decent to a point that crippled him as a master of his home or an accumulator of wealth. Madelaine had once characterized him as standing on the edge of the mainstream of life, smiling and saying, "Pardon me," "After you,"and "No, thank you."
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
304d9ba
|
The lake water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.
|
|
karen-russell
st-lucys-home
|
Karen Russell |
|
4365cf1
|
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.
|
|
karen-russell
st-lucys-home
|
Karen Russell |
|
ca58a5a
|
We don't have any garlic bulbs, so I bring the cauliflower, and hope that any vampires I encounter will be of the myopic, easily duped variety.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
a94a648
|
Anger needed an anchor, a plug, a wall. (I am angry because of ____.) Otherwise you had a beam of red feeling searching vainly through the universe. You had a heart that shot red light into space.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
63ed83b
|
As dizzy as the stars, as near and alone.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
ed46487
|
He looks me to pieces ... I realize now that I have been glimpsed and corner-of-the-eyed before, by the Chief and my sister and the yawning tourists. But I have never actually been looked at. Not like this.
|
|
karen-russell
looking
looks
male-gaze
seeing
seeing-people
staring
|
Karen Russell |
|
ff232d9
|
That's one difference between a bully and a hero, I guess: good aim.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
66b6fb7
|
Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn't just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what's done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
f2cff3f
|
Mothers burning inside the risen suns of their children. After
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
a3f5516
|
What a weird future awaited her in the past!
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
efd3345
|
I whispered to Ossie that I wanted to see the register for Death's aeroplane. Who was boarding the plane in such a stupid order? The
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
801f802
|
We've been working out of our tin can for half a decade. Nobody suggests moving into a brick-and-mortar office; nobody wants to peer through glass windows, in a building with a foundation, and admit that the insomnia emergency is now a permanent condition.
|
|
epidemic
|
Karen Russell |
|
98e7989
|
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.
|
|
out-to-sea
|
Karen Russell |
|
499a3fa
|
Increasingly, Sawtooth's own memories are a loud bright muddle, like opening the door on a party full of strangers. He lies awake at night, limping down the long corridors of his memory, trying to find the girl's hands, ...
|
|
out-to-sea
|
Karen Russell |
|
11fbb3a
|
He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he's still whole.
|
|
out-to-sea
|
Karen Russell |
|
ddee65b
|
The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.
|
|
out-to-sea
|
Karen Russell |
|
62044cf
|
The Avalanche," peacemaker Rachel recites, "is . It's a privilege to sing it. It's a celebration of our past." Everybody around the table smiles at her. "Yeah? Well, I've seen how easily the past can get rewritten." I glare at Mr. Oamaru. "Lyrics change. New authors come along."
|
|
karen-russell
occurrence-00-422
|
Karen Russell |
|
0d61f8e
|
Even at this altitude, the substitute pilot's bathed in sweat, sweat running down his chin and neck. Fear must be the fountain of youth, because the substitute pilot now looks younger than any of us, doughy and flushed with horror.
|
|
karen-russell
occurrence-00-422
|
Karen Russell |
|
46ec339
|
Whatever song we are making in this place, we are going to die without hearing.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
9ccd46c
|
Her name in a stranger's mouth was a resurrection; however briefly, she was alive with him again again. Even that little shove could roll back the tomb.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
fffde99
|
She's dead. She's dead.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
c141244
|
i haf the sownd of more words butt i coud not remember the shaps of the letters.
|
|
karen-russell
|
Karen Russell |
|
f3b65a1
|
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.
|
|
karen-russell
|
Karen Russell |
|
acaab88
|
I just want to tell her that I'm sorry," Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be."
|
|
karen-russell
|
Karen Russell |
|
15cba98
|
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.
|
|
karen-russell
sleep-away-camp
|
Karen Russell |
|
2b3e026
|
Touch me again, Bird Man, I thought urgently. Tell a joke, say anything -- because I was having the convection feeling. As if my skin were rippling, dissolving. Kiwi describes this phenomenon, "convection" {n}, in his Field Notes: the rapid cooling of a body in the absence of all tourists. Even Kiwi, King of Stage Fright, admitted to feeling it on Sunday nights. Convection caused your thoughts to develop an alarming blue tinge and required ..
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
f3b2861
|
This new happiness had angles. Happiness like his was real; it had a jewel-cut shadow, and he could lose it.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
55a1788
|
Unless an object is acted on by friction from an outside force, it will spiral through space, in the same direction at the same speed - indefinitely!
|
|
star-gazers-log
summer-time-crime
|
Karen Russell |
|
8f79d22
|
The baby turtles are turning away from the ocean. It's easy to see why. The black waves lap up the moonbeams, and the starlight on the inky surface of the water gives off such a pale glow when you compare it to the megawatt flashlights that Raffy is swirling in hypnotic circles.
|
|
star-gazers-log
summer-time-crime
|
Karen Russell |
|
b6417bf
|
Heaven would be a comfy armchair....You'd get a great, private phonograph, and all of eternity to listen to your life's melody. You could isolate your one life out of the cacophonous galaxy--the a cappella version--or you could play it back with its accompaniment, embedded in the brass and strings of mothers, fathers, sisters, windfalls and failures, percussion cities of strangers. You could play it forward or backward, back and back, and l..
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
59b8cec
|
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
westward-migration
|
Karen Russell |
|
537b484
|
Grammar can erect a false wall. Look at how I keep falling into this trap, writing this piece. To refer to the thousands of diverse individuals with unique histories who are sleeping on the street tonight as "the homeless" certainly expedites a sentence. But it inadvertently reinforces an ugly and false idea, perhaps secretly consoling: that "the homeless" are a monolithic population, a different species of person from those of "us" lucky e..
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
2b39a3c
|
I don't even want to try to understand it, and so begin to mistake it for something else after that, paling shadows of this original feeling, something inaudibly delicate that would not survive the passage into speech.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
de35cb4
|
when you're raising weather by artificial means, it's hard to pretend you don't have a hand in the change
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
060a4e5
|
People talk about heredity as if it's linear and vertical. Dead people pass things "down" to the young."
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
5af1723
|
People with options feel torn. People with options feel pulled, tugged - people who can move in multiple directions. Whereas those without homes are often immobilized by illness and poverty and addition. They lack stable shelter, a bed in which to dream. Without this most basic infrastructure, how does a person so much as imagine alternatives, let alone move toward them, inhabit them? Feeling 'torn' is yet another luxury of the highly mobil..
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
50bd50b
|
If they heard Death mounting the stairs at night, footsteps that the teenage Beverly swore she could feel vibrating through the floorboards at three a.m., nobody mentioned this intrusion at breakfast.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
d48a595
|
At the Hoho's Family Restaurant, Beverly treats herself to peanut butter pancakes and world news.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
1c20639
|
I say nothing. But I keep thinking: It's been two years. What if all the Olivia-ness has already seeped out of her and evaporated into the violet welter of clouds? Evaporated, and rained down, and evaporated, and rained down. Olivia slicking over all the rivers and trees and dirty cities in the world. So that now there is only silt, and our stupid, salt-diluted longing. And nothing left of our sister to find.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
d0cc1e9
|
Maybe that rusty boat hangar looked like the entrance to a cave to her," he'd said. Maybe. If you were eight, and near-sighted, and nostalgic for places that you'd never been. But if the Glowworm Grotto actually exists, that changes everything. Olivia's ghost could be there now, twitching her nose with rabbity indignation - "But I left you a map!" Wondering what took us so long to find her."
|
|
|
Karen Russell |
|
01a0612
|
My dad's version of the book, the staid, declarative Guide to the Galaxy, 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 to the publishing industry: phosphorescence fades to black and white, and facts cease to be fun.
|
|
|
Karen Russell |