Sublime

The people Crossan described as the expendables, those at the bottom of the bottom of the world’s pyramids of power.

“We should report it!” exclaims Shay, knowing that what she says is absurd. The rudimentary forces of law on the island have no interest in the ravings of a crazy foreigner up on the remote north coast. Or in the fate of one maimed woman from a distant tribe. And, how much of the tale Franco recounted actually occurred? As sometimes happens on Nara

amalgam

filled with the kind of determined cheer that masked a deeper despair.

Easily, he slept; and as he slept, the woman in the photograph took her arm from the pastor’s waist, and crossed the parched lawn towards the camera. Her black skirts, thickly beaded at the hem, obscured the view of Bethesda; then her fine and muddied boots came over the frame, and were first set squarely on the table, then one by one on the floor:

“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”

But Thomas Hart, who still feared death’s sting, was grieving in his pew under the halted moons. Weak light shone on the brass plaque bolted to the coffin: ANNE MARGARET MACAULAY. So that varnished pine contained her flushed cheeks, walking shoes, prudence, preference for Yorkshire tea, shyness, cuttings of African violet, habit of testing the heat

the horror that fell from the lips of Antonia, the housekeeper. (‘They say they’re killing whole families over there, shooting priests and putting out their eyes … throwing people into vats of boiling oil … May God have mercy on their souls !’)