In lieu of a casket were siamese twin fetuses in a jar. In lieu of human guests, only Pacific barreleye fish were invited, to make the giant-eyed twins feel at ease.
With no barrier against the material world, the fish …
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To reconcile these two impulses–the impulse to skim that today’s media teaches us and the impulse to suck just the tiniest morsel of life’s marrow and thereby learn something from a decrepit old book–I suspect the typical reader reaches for the simplest literature available. Hence Harry Potter. Hence John Grisham and Dan Brown. Assuming that most of these oversimplified are simply remixes of better, more powerful stories, I do not begrudge these readers their books. There are other readers. There are better books. To each his own. […] When the preacher came, no lie any adult could tell would put me at ease. Preacher Curley was bald, perpetually red-faced, and short. On Sunday mornings he was all fire and brimstone and Baptist, delivering baleful sermons to a flock eager for chastening. On Sunday afternoons, he had dinner with my grandparents, and sometimes I was there too, cowed into politeness by my memories of earlier in the day. But it was a Saturday this time that Preacher Curley drove up. There’s no church on Saturdays. Papaw died that afternoon, in the middle of Preacher Curley’s prayers. […] |
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"There are times I've wished I said all the folly in my heart and not the wisdom in my head." ~ A.J. Roach |
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