No Poem Is the Only Poem. No Story Is the Only Story. No Kings.
I was twenty-four when this all happened. In my late forties, I’d have friends who’d watch their parents die, put kids in ICU, euthanise their cat; you get the last gift of adulthood then, when it, or something like it, happens. You start thinking about people differently.
He works late into the evening, restoring the shotgun inherited forty-eight years ago from his Uncle Ian. It must be finished before Miles arrives “sometime Saturday, maybe Sunday.” It is typical of Miles’ self-importance that he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, specify a day, the unsubtle implication that his time is precious, Oren’s not.
He grew up isolated by his optimism, his openhearted determination to promote goodwill, waxing tall, with smooth green limbs that only looked soft, fleshy.
Reading Was the Easy Part,
less strenuous than inventing imaginary companions for an increasingly disturbed only child with literate parents for models.
Monstrous—that was how I felt! It is impossible to convey how this sentence spoke to me, how it seemed to capture my own predicament. To this day, I consider it the greatest opening in all of literature. It presents the story’s fundamental premise without preamble or build-up. It is practically a short-story in itself! But again, what kind of story?
Finding no-one in the backyard, the officers asked to search the inside of the house. Eneas followed them as they looked through every room, even the bathroom. On a glass shelf in the bathroom stood the little frosted crystal bottle with the round cap—his father’s lemony cologne. His father called it “Ger-lane” and had often said that no true Cuban man would ever wear any other scent.