Phyllis > Recent Status Updates

"Indeed! You've not heard the tales of Siltarien Silvertongue, the gentleman thief"
("Dirty cutpurse," muttered Mash.)
"friend of fortune, villain to the wealthy, pilferer of
pearls-"
("It was a bushel of oysters, and stank like hell.")
"—who has now given up his felonious ways, and has instead become an honest adventurer, coming to the aid of strange young women on the road!"

It is possible to write yourself out of loneliness. Possible, too, to write yourself into being. As her body shrank, Maralyn built herself out of words, sentence by sentence. …She was still alive. Look, it said so on the page.
If any of her papers got wet, she would spend hours drying hem in the sun, handling them with the kind of care usually served for ancient texts, or as if they contained some vital formula...

Now and then, in brighter moments, Maurice liked to entertain the idea that they had become at one with the Pacific, able to cohabit with its creatures as if they were of the water themselves. But times like this exposed the absurdity of such a view. Living on an ocean was possible only with a range of functioning, man-made defences to mitigate the experience.

Maurice began to teach her how to sail, and after a few days he judged she was ready to operate the tiller on her own. Everything went we until they ploughed at speed into a riverbank. Maurice, chastising himself, had forgotten her "novice status," as he put it. They spent the afternoon digging out the boat with knives and forks, teased by passersby

When he went to bed that night his mind was made up to run away. He felt like an eagle: hard, sufficient, potent, remorseless, strong. But that passed, though he did not then know that, like the eagle, his own flesh as well as all space was still a cage.

He slept less than two hours. When he waked dawn was just beginning. Lying in the single blanket upon the loosely planked floor of the sagging and gloomy cavern acrid with the thin dust of departed hay and faintly ammoniac with that breathless desertion of old stables, he could see through the shutterless window in the eastern wall the primrose sky and the high, pale morning star of full summer.

Byron listened quietly, thinking to himself how people everywhere are about the same, but that it did seem that in a small town, where evil is harder to accomplish, where opportunities for privacy are scarcer, that people can invent more of it in other people's names. Because that was all it required: that idea, that single idle word blown from mind to mind.

There was such a work, she knew: "North Dormer and the Early Townships of Eagle County." She had a special grudge against it because it was a limp weakly book that was always either falling off the shelf or slipping back and disappearing if one squeezed it in between sustaining volumes.

Such had been the sole link between North Dormer and literature, a link piously commemorated by the erection of the monument where Charity Royall, every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, sat at her desk under a freckled steel engraving of the deceased author, and wondered if he felt any deader in his grave than she did in his library.

Because wherever he came from and wherever he had been, a man knew that he was just living on the country, like a locust. It was as though he had been doing it for so long now that all of him had become scattered and diffused and now there was nothing left but the transparent and weightless shell blown oblivious and without destination upon whatever wind.

I've been gone for almost five years, cut off from the world, birthdays and Christmases, gone without so much as a call from Earth. … I wasn't crying because I missed home, but … For the years I hadn't seen pass but that now flooded the room like ghosts. I mourned that young boy and girl, whose biggest worry was whether they should reach for each other's hand as they lay on the carpet, staring at the ceiling.

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.

…this was just an undistinguished small-town tragedy, a part of the inexorable snowfall of girls and boys who every day slip through the world's fingers and melt away.

.something told Labadie not to look away, to keep watching, to pay attention…The Fitzgerald slowly pivoted into the five-hundred-foot-wide Superior Entry Channel, then glided between Minnesota Point and Wisconsin Point-the two slender arms of land reaching out from each state, nearly touching in the water.After the Fitz slipped out of the safety of their embrace, Labadie watched her cruise out into Lake Superior...

"There were hardly any weirdos, either, and there can be a lot of weirdos on ships—and this was the seventies! Now this may be the perspective of a college kid, but on the other ships you learned how to keep to yourself. Do your job. Go back to your room. Go to the mess when you want to eat, but don't talk too much.

But on the Fitz, it wasn't like that. It was a really good bunch of guys.”

Which, if this story hasn't displeased you, should make you think kindly of the man who wrote it and, also, a little, of the man who revised it. But if we have only succeeded in boring you instead, believe me, we didn't do so on purpose.

Perpetua:
"Everyone else is doing their best. So will we. Excuse me, but don't you have something else to do besides getting in my way? Don't you realize that we are all trying to save our skin? Do you think the soldiers are coming only for you? You might give me a hand at a time like this instead of getting in my way with your whining and fretting."

But what is history, Don Ferrante would often ask, without politics? A guide who walks and walks and walks with no one following him to learn the way, is wasting his steps. Just as politics without history is a man walking without a guide.

The women vied with one another in congratulations, sympathy, and questions; they exclaimed their sadness at hearing that Lucia would be leaving the next day. The men competed with one another in volunteering services: Each one wanted to stand guard over their cottage that night. This fact inspired our anonymous author to formulate a proverb: If you dont want too many helpers, then try not to need them!

For it was another one of her maxims that, in order to do what's good for a person, the first rule, in most cases, is not to tell them what you have planned.

"Don't be surprised," she said. "When you know the world as well as I do, you'll see that there's nothing to be surprised at. Nobles are all a little bit mad: some more, some less, some in one way, some in another. It's best to just let them talk, especially when you need them. Pretend that you're taking them seriously, as if they were saying reasonable things.”

And she went to put on the kettle
Who knows would she have done it Maybe the kettle was only for tea Life at that time was like walking on a path made of spinning tops You took a step you were spun off one way The next step spun you off another Every moment was the moment when everything changed

She saw herself too, a schoolgirl, wrongness buzzing within her like a bee trapped in a veil, clutching on to her best friend's hand. Tonight would go too, fade away, like white plumes of chemicals into the blue. Her heart let out a sad mewl of grief, as if she were dissolving into the shadows, or the shadows were in her, eating her from the inside out.

She remembered something he'd said once, about how the past hung in the present like smoke in the air, like vapour trails, fading out slowly. She hadn't understood it then but now for a moment it seemed she could see it, literally: Uncle Frank, lying burning in a blue meadow, her mother embedded in the glass windows of the church, coloured light streaming from her body.

That was why, though she still thought sometimes about what Ms Ogle had said, she couldn't credit that these weeks were the ones that would decide all weeks to come. She found it impossible to believe that now, the present, so flimsy and flyaway, whipsawing, switchbacking, should be the image the rest of her life was cast in, when she could barely see herself in it at all.