Phyllis > Recent Status Updates

When Fritzie came home she stopped smoking for good. … After a few tobaccoless, idle months, her face bloomed from acid yellow, to peach, to rose. She gained weight and let her hair grow from the peroxide bleach to brown. She had been hard, one track, always someone to reckon with, but now she softened. Overnight she became a stout woman of no particular menace.

The shop was my perfect home…floors were cast of concrete with hot-water pipes running through them for warmth. The thick walls were finished off with stucco, painted a smooth glossy white. Because the doorways were rounded, the place seemed like a cave carved out of a hillside. The light fell green and watery through thick glass window-blocks except in the kitchen where the screen door let through a blast of sun.

My mind hardened, faceted and gleaming like a magic stone, and I saw my mother clearly.
…
All night she fell through the awful cold. Her coat flapped open and her black dress wrapped tightly around her legs. Her red hair flowed straight upward like a flame. She was a candle that gave no warmth. My heart froze. I had no love for her. That is why, by morning, I allowed her to hit the earth.

When her fingers released the card into the mail slot she thought that she felt nothing..as she was falling asleep to Aunt Fritzie's adding machine, she imagined she saw the postcard alight in her mother's hands. Adelaide stared down and examined each detail of the picture, butshe could not see her daughter, who was too small to tell of, looking directly through her, not dead but securely hidden in the aerial view.

…Fleur Pillager proceeded to knead, mold, and tap the floating splinters of my bones back into the shape of ankles, feeling her own from time to time to get the shape right. The packets I thought were flour were really plaster of Paris. Out of it she made my casts and shaped them with carved splinters from the only branch within a mile of the railroad rack, the apple branch, torn from an Argus tree...

On a cold spring morning in 1932 the train brought both an addition and a subtraction. They came by freight. By the time they reached Argus their lips were violet and their feet were so numb that, when they jumped out of the boxcar, they stumbled and scraped their palms and knees through the cinders.

Close your eyes and imagine, first, a cold and angry emptiness. The emptiness roars around you. You are on a sea, hurtling where the wind and water take you. You fall and you rise in darkness. The falling is fast and unforgiving and twists your gut as you count the seconds downward. The rising is worse. The sea towers forty feet above you, and you know only the terror that comes before falling.

..despite the importance of this place and these specks, I don't enjoy being down here. ... Something about the pre-life-ness of it, which in a way is death, though Orly would tell me I'm mad, that this place is the opposite of death. Maybe it's the stasis of it then, the way that life is being kept dormant. Maybe it has nothing to do with the seeds at all, and is simply the underground of it, or the deep, deep cold.

That she should have been so clear in her intention suggests that by the age of sixteen, if not sooner, Rosalind had realised what Albert Einstein had gradually learned about himself: that a scientist makes science “the pivot of his emotional life, in order to find in this way the peace and security which he cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.”

I clawed his smooth back for a handhold and finally perched, or so it seemed, on the rim of his heavy belt. ... Pedestrians swiveled to catch a glimpse of us—a mountain tearing by balanced on a toy, and clinging to the sheer northwest face, a scrawny half-breed howling something that Dopplered across the bridge and faded out, finally, in the parking lot of Saint Adalbert's Hospital.

Not only did Gerry's friends lack all forms of identification except their band cards, not only did they disappear out of no malice but simply because Gerry was tried during powwow time...

But there is nothing more vengeful and determined in this world than a cowboy with sore balls, and Gary soon found this out. He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side, because they have names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you.

Marie:
I would visit Leopolda not just to see her but to let her see me. I would let her see I had not been living on wafers of God's flesh but the fruit of a man. Long ago she had tried for my devotion. Now I'd let her see where my devotion had gone and where it had got me. For by now I was solid class. Nector was tribal chairman. My children were well behaved, and they were educated too.

He watched without moving, so finally I got up and stood over Moses. My shadow spread, a cool place in the radiance that heated the ground. My shade was pleasant at first, but I stood there so long that he finally shivered in the dark shape I cast.

Where they have the convent is on top of the highest hill, so that from its windows the Sisters can be looking into the marrow of the town. Recently a windbreak was planted before the bar "for the purposes of tornado insurance." Don't tell me that. That poplar stand was put up to hide the drinkers…served into the beast of their burden…crawl out the bar door, pulling a weight they can't move past the poplars.

For William's entire life, hed been trying to hold himself together. There was the little boy coughing in his closet, trying not to upset his parents. The unsteady college student…The young man who was relieved to be chosen by a powerhouse of a woman... He’d followed her every instruction, but eventually the directions had led him so far away from himself that he was no longer a person.

That phrase-I'm in love-sent an ache like an arrow into his past. He knew that he never would have been able to love Julia in a true, deep way, nor she love him. And now, in his new, safe life, he was landlocked, and love was the sea; William had chosen stability over any more risk or loss.

For William, [writing] was something he worked on because there was a silence inside him that sometimes frightened him. Basketball was noisy— the game took place at tempo, with ten men jumping, shooting, guarding, cutting at every moment-and writing about it masked William's internal quiet. He could listen to the thumping of the basketball, in the gym or on the page, and imagine that it was his own heartbeat.

Sylvie looked around at the bent heads, her sweating, weeping sis-rs and her rock-faced mother, and knew they were all in trouble. harlie had seen and loved each of them for who they were. When any of his girls-including Rose-had come into view, he'd always given them the same welcome, calling out, “Hello beautiful!” The greeting was nice enough to make them want to leave the room and come in all over again.

When Sylvie looked back on that moment-from the funeral pew, and later…—it would always be one of her great joys that her father had said this …[and] by paraphrasing one of his favorite poems: "We are not contained between our hats and boots." …and the father and daughter had walked home, their arms touching, molecules dancing between them, and the stars turning on like tiny lightbulbs in the evening sky.

Relatives and cousins Sylvie had let only a handful of times because so-and-so hated so-and-so ar-ved and departed in tears or huffs. ... There was an infrastructure of grudges that had shaped Charlie's and Rose's extended families and kept them away from one another. When the Padavano sters thought of family, they'd always pictured only the six people who lived under their roof.

"You need to work on your handle. You know Bill Bradley? That gawky guy on the Knicks? When he was a kid, he taped cardboard to his glasses so he couldn't look down, couldn't see his feet. And then he dribbled up and down the sidewalk wearing those glasses. He looked crazy, no doubt, but his handle got real tight. He has a perfect feel for how the ball will bounce and how to find it without looking."

Lord Taran finished his tea and stood, setting the cup carefully on the rock. "I will go on ahead. Naturally, everyone is expecting you to appear at some point, and so a number of the queen's soldiers are lying in wait for you at various places around the castle grounds. I will get them out of the way, at least. Then you can sweep in and terrify us all with your sewing kit, my lord."

On the faerie snails
After my unpleasant run-in with these uncanny denizens during my previous visit-I can still feel their shells breaking beneath my hands and knees, and hear their tiny screams of agony-I desired to know more about them. ... Apparently, they possess a crude intelligence and value their dignity above all things; as such, they spend most of their lives occupied with revenge quests.

“I have been thinking a great deal, Mr Townsend,” said Mrs Penniman.
“You think too much.”
“I suppose I do; but I can't help it, my mind is so terribly active. When I give myself, I give myself. I pay the penalty in my headaches, my famous headaches a perfect circlet of pain! But I carry it as a queen carries her crown.“

"Is he in earnest about Catherine, then?
“I don't see why you should be incredulous,” said Mrs Almond. “It seems to me that you have never done Catherine justice. You must remember that she has the prospect of thirty thousand a year.”
The Doctor looked at his sister a moment, and then, with lightest touch of bitterness, “You at least appreciate her,” he said.

For he's something they are not-something greater than they are and at the same time a good deal less. As if he were a man who had walked away from his own humanity. I think that, secretly, many of his neighbors may be a bit ashamed of him, shamed because he has, somehow, perhaps ignobly, side-stepped growing old, one of the penalties, but perhaps, as well, one of the rights of all humankind.

The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.