Sublime

For reflection: Esther 6:6–14 SCREWTAPE OBSERVES: Whatever men expect they soon come to think they have a right to: the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. —from The Screwtape Letters

Within a year of the battle at Chester, whether or not Æðelfrið’s campaign had been directed at Edwin or at those who would shelter him, the exiled prince left, or was encouraged to leave, the protection of his British sponsors and seek sanctuary with a king whom he must have believed lay beyond Æðelfrið’s reach. Rædwald, he of the Sutton Hoo ship

utterly foolish;

She stood beside Nathan in the shadow of the open door; and it seemed to Thomas that he saw them as children and adults simultaneously, their bodies flickering between time past, and time to come. It suits me to think them children, he thought with pain, but they are not: here is a man with cigarettes in his pocket and God knows what else, here is

Adam waits, month by month, for the choked black walnut to die and take his baby brother with it, smothered in his own clown-covered coverlet. But both live, which only proves to Adam that life is trying to say something no one hears.