Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope
Her eyes watered and she was a foot taller than any of her sisters, mostly because of the length of her neck which would one day hang from the end of a rope
The zipper opened all the way down our spines.
Her head appears to be on fire but it is only a trick of the light. It was June 13, eighty-three degrees out, under sunny skies.
Their desire was silent yet magnificent, like a thousand daisies attuning their faces toward the path of the sun.
I don't know what you're feeling, I won't even pretend
They're just memories now. Time to write them off.
I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.
Three times a day Petrovich showed up at the nurse's office for his injections, always using the hypodermic needle himself like the most craven of junkies, though after shooting up he would play the concert piano in the auditorium with astounding artistry, as though insulin were the elixir of genius.
In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.
We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm.
In the end, it wasn't death that surprised her but the stubbornness of life.
We knew that Cecilia had killed herself because she was a misfit, because the beyond called to her, and we knew that her sisters, once abandoned, felt her calling from that place, too.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide- it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese- the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.
We realized that the version of the world they rendered for us was not the version of the world they really believed in...
Scars crossed her welded wrists.
What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.
She held herself very straight, like Audrey Hepburn, whom all women idolize and men never think about.
Winter is the season of alcoholism and despair.
Added to their loveliness was a new mysterious suffering, perfectly silent, visible in the blue puffiness beneath their eyes or the way they would sometimes stop in mid-stride, look down, and shake their heads as though disagreeing with life.
She wanted out of the decorating scheme.
You don't understand me. I'm a teenager. I've got problems!
All sixteen mentioned her jutting ribs, the insubstantiality of her thighs, and one, who went up to the roof with Lux during a warm winter rain, told us how the basins of her collarbones collected water.
Shit. What have kids got to be worried about now? If they want trouble, they should go live in Bangladesh.
You never get over it. But you get to where it doesn't bother you so much.
Aloft, he looked frail, diseased, and temperamental, as we expected a European to look.
The following doodle: a girl with pigtails is bent under the weight of a gigantic boulder. Her cheeks puff out, and her rounded lips expel steam. One widening steam cloud contains the word Pressure, darkly retraced.
Basically what we have here is a dreamer. Somebody out of touch with reality. When she jumped, she probably thought she'd fly
The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind.
But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.
The seeds of death get lost in the mess that God made us.
He hadn't suffered the eternity of the ring about to be picked up, didn't know the heart rush of hearing that incomparable voice suddenly linked with his own, the sense it gave of being too close to even see her, of being actually inside her ear.
The time has to be right and the heart willing.
He left in a state of distraction and a winter coat.
The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.
© 2020 Inspirational Stories
© 2020 Inspirational Stories