Sublime

The characters are poor dairy farmers. One morning the husband is too hung over to do the milking. His wife does it and when she has finished the cows are frightened by thunder and stampede, trampling her. She is also hooked severely in one leg. Her husband is asleep and does not hear her cry out. Finally she drags herself home and wakes him up. He

My dad was a man of infinite varieties of bitterness, rage, distaste. In my lifelong struggle to avoid becoming him, I’d developed an inability to demonstrate much negative emotion at all.

Danny had a parrot named Fucker. And besides dealers and hookers, Danny only had two visitors to his house—his mother and his parole officer. The parrot didn’t have many words or sentences to blurt out, because neither did Danny. So his parole officer would drop in, or his mother might bring him a casserole, and Fucker would say one of two things:

The moral of his story was how you never know the size of hurt that’s in people’s hearts, or what they’re liable to do about it, given the chance.

Father knew exactly how bad we were but he loved us just the same.