words

Here he was, slapping him five, grabbing his shoulder, and talking too loud in a performance of gregariousness. A walking flinch.

He is smiling with every tooth

I like it when it rains hard. It sounds like white noise everywhere, which is like silence but not empty.

He was utterly still, the type of quiet that I had thought could not belong to humans, a stilling of everything but breath and pulse—like a deer, listening for the hunter’s bow.

Zeus’ thunderbolts still smell of singed flesh and patricide.

“I feel like I could eat the world raw.”

That would be like the lamb handing a knife to the butcher.

I cannot escape the feeling that, below the surface, something is breaking.

Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate.