Sublime

she was little; hepaticas, trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit.

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson. Two thousand miles to

She wasn’t much of a Catholic, but like other people who crave order, she was superstitious.

As Indians had for generation after generation, they were attempting to understand a white man reading endlessly from a sheaf of papers.

Lowell captured Dante’s appeal to readers—Belle included—with his dictum that the poet was “part of the soul’s resources in time of trouble.”

She had studied the habits of the monied with diligence. She copied their modes of dress and speech, and cultivated an air of carelessness. But she was ill at ease around the household staff and the caterers, because she feared that if anyone from her home planet were to look at her too closely, they’d see through her disguise.