Quotes from Rae Meadows

In a span of months she had present for birth and for death, the wondrous first breath and the horrible last. But wasn't it an honor to be there at the end of life as well as the beginning? To mark the extraordinariness of a lifetime, to bear witness to its completion?

Maybe next year. Everything was maybe next year.

His dreams were getting more frightful—rising black swirls of water, cars floating by like river bugs—but he didn't know much about how to build a boat. The steam box was a start, even if he couldn't tell Annie, even though the line between faith and becoming unhinged seemed perilously narrow.

Annie watched them all walk together, like sleepwalkers, she thought, jackrabbits trying to outrun them. The two ends of the line pulled in to form a semicircle, a giant net of humanity. *

é una strana accozzaglia di cose, vero? Ciò che resta di una vita.

What does that matter when he makes me happy?" There was an adjustment her mother made then, a slight giving in, a relaxing of her shoulders, as if she wondered for just a moment what that kind of freedom might feel like.

She felt like the crushed petals of a violet, dark and limp. No, no, no. She bit her knuckle until she tasted blood. Cy was gone.

The Macks. They left." "Left?" Samuel asked. "For California, I guess. The whole family." Birdie pressed her lips together and dragged her palms across the rough wood behind her. There was nowhere for her shock to settle, a slow-motion spinning as the realization rose up and throbbed behind her eyes. She sat down in the weeds and tried to feel the splinters burrowing into the pads of her hands, but the pain was not enough. She

again. Fred

He says in dirty hands flowers will die.

She hadn't thought that much about sex after she and Samuel had settled into their marriage. There had been moments of passion, certainly in those early days—finally they could be together in that way—but she relegated her needs to a shelf just out of reach, as she thought she should, as women did.

And it wasn't as if she could talk about it with Samuel, couldn't even imagine talking about it. Eventually she saw sex as part of being a wife.

He has an idea. For wood. Or Styron does. Something about boxcars." "Boxcars?" "A mess of them at the old yard." "That's good news. That's real good news." He smiled, and she braced herself for the three words that she knew would follow. "The Lord provides," he said. She felt

like upending the whole table, running until her lungs burned and her insides retched. With little wind

She hadn't seen the mayor come in, though she knew he was behind her somewhere. She could sense the heat of his gaze, her hair prickly, her neck warm. How thrilling it was to feel this way, rattled by his mere presence, wanting only to give in to his pull. But desire was awful, too, full of trapdoors and sharp hooks.

Stay calm," the mayor said, though it was unnecessary. They were calm, resigned to the storms that had, over these months, worn them thin. How fast a new normal took hold.

Above the sink in the scratched mirror he looked grubby and bloated, his beard a grizzled mess. He knew what these men could never know: A man is who he is. That doesn't change. A thief is a thief. A bad man stays a bad man underneath. He'd been set at seventeen. "You want to end

She was in the middle of nowhere, and it was a delicious feeling to know that no one knew where she was.

Beneath the damage she can still find moments of wonder, hints of joy. Would she even say she is optimistic? It isn't the shiny optimism that lifts Samuel, but it's a hard-won kind, born from the depths. A choice. It is enough.

Maybe God posted signs visible only to those with eyes to see. She wasn't one of them, but she could accept that maybe her husband was.

We know everyone we love is going to die, but we don't know it, can't possibly believe it, she thought, or long ago I would have gone and started digging until I had a hole big enough to lie down in.