Solos By Genre | Ploughshares

“In a world of missing fathers, he is a father to many people, and it has been this way since he was very young, even though Emmanuel makes a habit of admitting to everyone that he is the furthest thing from a minister or a saint.” 

“The old seed lived on a watery bed, and at such times the soft swishing in her ears took on a sinister edge, the hiss of waves that tease their way to shore and catch you unawares. She taught herself one trick: when the fear rose, to go straight to the rocky shore. Fight waves with waves. Let the great sea belittle the stupid horror she couldn’t abide.” 

“In the letters, I told my grandfather that I was going to school in Hamilton for engineering, on a good scholarship. Told him I was engaged to a girl who was tall with good hips. I wanted my father to have to lie to my grandfather, to have to sing along to the tune of a life I’d pulled out of dark air and stuffed into envelopes—like anthrax—whenever I came up in conversation.” 

“People talk all sorts of clichés when other folks they know are dying, but it’s a whole other thing when it’s happening to you. You find out that it’s possible, actually, to fit more life into smaller periods of time. That’s the only way you can get over the heartbreak of it.” 

“They slept together, back to belly, like a pair of turtledoves or a pair of spoons. They were used to each other, at ease with each other, and wondered if the Platonic ideal—a shadow-self—had come to be embodied in their love.” 

“Normally, he tried not to think about Nickie, not even in this house, where they had been happiest; where on the wall over the tall walnut secretary desk Freddy used every day hung the photo of them wearing blazers, school ties, shorts, knee socks, loafers, their close-cropped kinky hair inherited from their mother; where Nickie had lived, not died.” 

“Very often the other women, for we are a city of women now, avoid looking. They scan the world one cubic meter at a time, unwilling to venture far outside that invisible box. Berliner Blick was what you called it.” 

"How did I come to God? As you see me. In these dark Kentucky woods. The hermitage—really no more than a square wooden hut with a desk, a single bed, and a hot plate (you seem surprised)—this quiet retreat has been my cherished home these last four years, even as I have remained largely away from it, in my house in Fort Worth with my children and my wife."

"One of her jobs at the Deverells’ was to gather up the letters, after they’d been read by the family and the neighbors whose sons had been mentioned, and file them in the special box. Each envelope smoothed and flattened. Each sheet unfolded, the creases pressed out under a stack of books and then gathered and tied with clean string, laid flat with the newest letter on the top."

"All week Max thinks about it. At night he falls asleep constructing the narrative and at work he spends the lunch hour in his car manufacturing details. When Sunday night rolls around and Nora has been put to bed and Julia is asleep or reading, he brings the radio station’s stream up on his computer. He’s in the den and the moon illuminates the snow falling outside.