Good words

“Old people know things we don’t because long ago, they didn’t listen to their elders either,” Quil said as they ducked into a darkened lean-to filled with moldering hay. “It’s tradition.”

A decade of the soldiers posted in the villages has instilled a healthy dose of fear, coating the villagers’ teeth like a plaque they can taste any time their tongues press up to speak.

I sat in the chair and untangled my consciousness from the cage of my physical self, so that I could run freely in a broad meadow of thoughts, like a romping dog off his leash.

several beers to the good.

Now the years were in her, bent like a soft nail, and there was just no getting them out.

He was no older than the rest of them judging by his face, but his drawl suggested a decadent, world-weary forty-year-old.

The sky was cloud-strewn and glutinously bright.

An exhalation jerked out of Matti in three parts, nearly soundless.

After a long, long pause, during which Luca breathed wetly into his fingers and refused to relinquish the kind blacks and sparkling browns that were dancing on his closed eyelids, Perse coughed.