Sublime

He’ll die of idealism, of being right when the world is wrong. He’ll die without knowing what she’s powerless to tell him—that he has helped her. That his heart is as good and as worthy as wood.

The smoke began to fill the large hollow; each clump bore the face it had worn in life. I saw the woman and two children I’d met in the village near Gomusan, as well as the old woman I’d come across at the train station. Countless other faces I’d never seen, and did not know crowded around me. There were three or four little urchins who’d slept und

At thirteen, he won a scholarship to the most elite of all, Eton, where he spent another four years, acquiring an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.

Above him, in the house that owns the pool, a light has come on, and children are looking down at him through their bedroom windows, all warm and fuzzy in their Li’l Crips and Ninja Raft Warrior pajamas, which can either be flameproof or noncarcinogenic but not both at the same time. Dad is emerging from the back door, pulling on a jacket. It is a

Fealty to kin, actual and imagined, and the protection of them, possible or not, were their father’s pride, his strongest instinct, and his chief source of satisfaction, frustration, and anxiety.

What about the South? His body recoiled. Ugh. Not that. As a white man he would have plenty of place, in fact more than he had here in the P.S.A. But … he did not want that kind of place.