Sublime

Over the years, he learned to tell stories that suited whoever happened to be in his audience on a given day. For a busload of young cancer survivors, he had tales about wolves, like Limpy, who had managed to overcome their disabilities and thrive.

During these times, his father would sometimes cry. Would sometimes speak nonsense words. Would hammer his fists or break something. At home, they’d developed a system: Roy’s mother would quickly help the man up into the bedroom and lay him down on the bed, while Roy quickly pulled the heavy blackout drapes, trying not to look at his father

Coyote knew a thing or two about untamed animals.

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.

“You know,” she said, “my father’s not such a bad guy. I get angry with him sometimes because he says terrible things, but deep down he’s honest and he really loved my mother. In his own way, he’s lived life with all the intensity he could muster. He’s a little weak, maybe, and he has absolutely no head for business, and people don’t like him very

Then that deep ancient chill of male jealousy of even his own progeny touched my heart.

A child has a mood—he or she wants to play, or stay in the room, or be loony. The grownups have bigger moods. The abusive, or depressed, or alcoholic, or workaholic, or crazy parent has an enormous mood, and it is the only mood that counts. The children and the other parent have to adapt to that big mood, serve it, cater to it, sacrifice their mood

In the white and empty room he stood in his bespoken suit with his hat in his hand and he peered down with his small and lashless pig’s eyes wherein this child just sixteen years on earth could read whole bodies of decisions not accountable to the courts of men and he saw his own name which nowhere else could he have ciphered out at all logged into