Sublime

Catharine and her children, and Louisa were dead. The act that destroyed them was, in the highest degree, inhuman. It was worthy of savages trained to murder, and exulting in agonies. Who was the performer of the deed? Wieland! My brother! The husband and the father! That man of gentle virtues and invincible benignity! placable and mild—an idolator

Anna could not put a name to it. She could not find the way to tell him how she felt inside, the way a bird must feel, she thought, when it was caged; that she was weeping because she could no more walk where she might wish to walk, or say what she might wish to say, and that there was no beach where she could run.

‘She was the wife of John Bell, who owned Lowlands until his death in 1889, and we’ve never known anything more about her: it’s as if she’s been cut out of time. We have records of their marriage, but not of her death; we have no portraits of her anywhere, and when the house and contents were sold none of her possessions were listed in the inventor

Florida drew the transient and rootless on the eternal promise of a second chance, with more than its share of scammers and con men. So who was to say the guy living next door wasn’t one of them? A subdivision like Carriage Pointe was Jane Jacobs’s vision of hell.

Donald Antrim,

But, again, the words don’t, can’t, come out and I sit there and the need to see the worst washes over me, quickly, eagerly.

WILLIAM HAD BEGUN TO WORRY THAT HE NO LONGER SPARKED JOY IN his wife and that she would give him to Goodwill. It was alarmingly easy to picture. His wife would thank him for his service and then drop him off at the donation center, the one behind the store with the blankly sinister roll-up doors. Goodwill would take him in and William would live ou

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.