Status Updates From The Best American Short Sto...

For the rest of her life what she remembered of that morning were the last sights she'd seen through two eyes: the shadows of leaves on the sunny floor, the hair on the backs of her father's hands, the stripe on the doctor's trousers, the handkerchief coming down. Then blindness.

They had both joined the service and, disguised in their uniforms, they could not be told from other people's children [until] they opened their mouths but they did that seldom. The smartest thing they had done was to get sent overseas and there to marry French wives. … They had married nice girls who naturally couldn't tell that they murdered the kings English or that the Greenleafs were who they were.

She loved her son and, loving him, she loved what he was trying to do. …for her to try to stop Johnny-Boy was to admit that all the toil of years meant nothing; and to let him go meant that sometime or other he would be caught, like Sug. In facing it this way she felt a little stunned, as though she had come suddenly upon a blank wall in the dark.

Ugh feeling like a chore