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 feel like I could eat the world raw.”

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

For the hyphenated

“Do not let what you gained this day be so easily lost.”

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.

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