At times she could feel her heart, like a child’s fist, clenching and unclenching inside her chest, and when the feeling came, it stopped her thought altogether and she would go about like a large hull of herself, moving for no reason; but she gained this incline without a tremor and stood at the top of it, pleased with herself.

She had never given much thought to the devil for she felt that religion was essentially for those people who didn’t have the brains to avoid evil without it.

shoat

No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.

Behind, in the distance, the city rose like a cluster of warts on the side of the mountain. The birds revolved downward and dropped lightly in the top of the highest pine and sat hunch-shouldered as if they were supporting the sky.

shoats,