Sublime

“He’s a salesman.

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 writhin

What kind of mother is she if she can’t sense whether her child is dead or alive?

I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of,

wraith) was. Gately’s eyes roll up in his head. The boy, who did everything well and with a natural unslumped grace the wraith himself had always lacked, and whom the wraith had been so terribly eager to see and hear and let him (the son) know he was seen and heard, the son had become a steadily more and more hidden boy, toward the wraith’s life’s

taupe,

short story by Dino Buzzati, one of the ones that struck such a chord in me as a teenager, called “Poor Little Boy,” about an ungrateful, malicious, sad little boy like Maxime Ribotton. He’s in a park with his mother, all the other kids make fun of him, bully him, humiliate him, push him away when he wants to play. At the end a lady says to his mot

“My mom warns and warns; it’s like she ‘cries wolf.’ My dad gives us one warning, and then he becomes the wolf.”