There is something fierce and starved about first ideas.
This is why people cry at the movies: because everybody’s doomed. No one in a movie can help themselves in any way. Their fate has already staked its claim on them from the moment they appear onscreen.
He gave everybody a grave look, and they passed the same look around among themselves, and I felt, watching, like I was either missing out on something or being let in on a big secret: or someplace in the space between those two possibilities, drifting.
When, eventually, the climb up the stairs got to be too much, she moved downstairs, and the second floor became an accidental museum commemorating the last day anybody’d lived there.
“I’ll tell you later” is a contingent claim that can be rendered false by any of several moves.
