Solos By Genre | Ploughshares

“Already, as a boy, I was connected to the bitter ocean, and to murderers who believed that they could control the powers of nature.” 

“Perhaps it was the strange beauty of Callahan’s stride, or the ugliness of a humanmachine, or simply the incongruence of amputee and speed. It was something none of them had seen before.” 

“No one knew her name, but all saw her face, and she liked this, being known only partially; the rest was a mystery, a blank slate on which she could write any future, any past.” 

“He seemed to be investigating the very fabric of our democracy, considering its holes, aghast at the ragged seams he never knew existed.” 

“He shouldn't have to say what he'd been thinking, something as basic as: Native people can be great, Native people can be assholes. We cover the same bandwidth of behavior and character as any other group walking the earth. We are human.”

“America’s untamed northwest, the way it must have looked to those first settlers before civilization rolled in on the back of steam engines and broken promises.” 

“You couldn’t shoot people for sneering. You could, however, shoot them for burning down stores and bankrupting people. And in fact, if nobody else was going to do it for you, you had to.” 

“Looking at the faces, they speak to her. Don’t think you’re different, they say. Trust us, they’ll hunt you to the world’s end. We, too, wanted to live a good life, but how can you when they keep you from living with dignity? Freedom, that is all that matters.” 

“This was what I felt as I walked with Margaretta among the flowers. Her spirit all at once was elsewhere: it had stepped out of the woman in the tight-fitting purple dress, the woman with the close-cropped hair expensively dyed to match the color it had been when we’d first known each other. I was alone again.” 

“Everyone always liked the wrong paintings. They would walk through decades of his life without knowing it, their eyes flitting past his best works and lingering over the easy ones, obediently wandering from room to room in a forced march of wonder. But he owed her. He knew the night was a ruse. She wanted to defect.”