Festival Days
Like Fowler at the end of The Quiet American, she is looking for someone to whom she can confess her guilt, own her complicity. But when she admits her deed to her father, Juan Pablo, she gets adulation in return. Klay’s prose is stirring and precise:
While he spoke, she stared silently out at the same city and mountains he did, but saw a different
... See moremailchi.mp • Sin Eaters in a Sacramental Cosmos
"Where is the worst place to die?” asked Noah. He slid a few inches deeper into the hot tub and looked around at everyone’s reaction.
Cecily was facing away from him. She ashed her cigarette into a glass tray emblazoned with an Italian beer brand.
Noah waited expectantly. His chest hair undulated under the water, which glowed green in the slope’... See more
The truth was that they’d cut Crystal open to get the baby out, and they’d killed her by doing that. It wasn’t something she chose. She hadn’t volunteered to die with noble womanly honour or be a shining example, but nobody mentioned that.
Margaret Atwood • The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale
I think of the time I saw a banker repossessing a home drop a woman’s house keys into the garbage. Her kid had made the key ring. It clanged when it hit the metal base. A few months later, I read a newspaper article about a banker’s murder, and part of me understood. Ants flee the stomping boot of power. Until, one day, they don’