Hope: A Tragedy

He imagined the scene at the gates of heaven to be not unlike that at the finish line of a long and grueling marathon: everyone high-fiving, hugging, collapsing, elated that it’s over, yes, it’s finally over, pouring cups of water over one another’s heads and saying, Holy shit, dude, that was fucking brutal. I am never doing that again.

Maybe Godot shows up in act three, my son; maybe the audience is just leaving too early. ESTRAGON: Where’d they all go? VLADIMIR: They were just here.

Maybe he was hoping he would come back as candy.

We think of the obvious signs of love—tenderness, concern, care—and yet somehow, nothing said more about the health of a couple’s relationship than whether or not they went to bed at the same time.

It seemed such an inadequate device, the heart—so finicky, so easily stopped, so Japanese when it should be so German. One moment it’s pumping, the next it’s not. And they lived. The end.

I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945.

You never see a lion crucifying another lion. You never see a bear just randomly murdering salmon for anything besides food; bears don’t form armies, invade rivers, tear the heads off male salmon, rape the female salmon, and enslave their salmon children.

He was emaciated, pale shrunken skin pulled tight over weary twisted bones, holding a cloth of some kind over himself in some final instinct of modesty and self-respect.

Has a gun owner ever, in the history of the weapon, been satisfied with a small gun? If a small gun can save me, he figures, what can a big gun save? What can the biggest gun save? What can a bomb save?