Nhi > Books: adult-fiction‎ (226)

“Deus Brânquia, at last, rises from the shoal, the blood sun carving the Serengeti, the ancient eye of eclipse, the ocean scalping open the new world, the insatiable glacier, the sea-spray spew, the bacterial bite, the single-cell seethe, the species spit, the rivers the vessels to a heart, the mountain’s hard erection, the sunflower’s swaying thighs, the gray-fur mortification, the pink-flesh fester, the umbilical vine cording us back to the origin. It is all this and more.”

“She heard them talk about kissing. One girl said, ‘He makes me feel like somebody,’ and Elisa dwelled upon it for months. What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?”

“Here was a place where fantasy overwhelmed real life, where it was too dark to see scars and silence wasn’t only accepted but enforced by flashlight-armed ushers. For two hours and eight minutes, she was whole.”

“She knows that she’s been the thing in the water before. She’s been the voiceless one from whom men have taken without ever asking what she wanted. She can be kinder than that. She can balance the scales of life. She can do what no man ever tries to do with her: communicate.”

“His palm releases the E and his fingers open into a hesitant fan. Elisa nods support and signs G, pointing off to her left. This is considered good signing, but the creature is a novice. His three smallest fingers pinwheel to touch the heel of his hand and he points his index finger directly at Elisa. Her vision spins. Her chest throbs joyfully, almost painfully. He sees her. He doesn’t look through her like Occam’s men or past her like Baltimore’s women. This beautiful being, however he might have hurt those who hurt him first, is pointing at her and only her.”

“This time she’s got her eyes on the creature, and his light doesn’t only brighten this water, it electrifies it, imbues it with a turquoise glow that shines off the lab walls like liquid fire. The physical objects of table and records slide from Elisa’s awareness as she is reeled toward the pool, her skin blue by reflection, her blood blue, too, she just knows it. Wherever the creature has come from, he’s never heard music like this, a multitude of separate songs so meshed in joyful unison. The water directly around him begins changing - yellow, pink, green, purple.”

“The touch of his hand, rare but thrilling, when he plucks eggs from her palm. The one time she dares hold nothing at all, and still he reaches out, draws his claws softly down her wrist, curling his hand into her palm as if enjoying the pretend-egg play, and letting her close her fingers around his, for that instant making the two of them not present and past, not human and beast, but woman and man.”

“She gazes into the creature’s eyes, still bright underwater, and listens to the soft bubbling of his breath. He blinks, a greeting. She unfolds an arm and fins her index finger through the water until it touches the back of his hand. Unexpectedly, he rolls the hand over so that she is touching his palm, her finger the single stamen of a huge, dewy, unfolding flower. Now she listens for her own breath, but hears nothing. Hands are how the two of them talk, but this? This is a touch. Elisa pictures the woman on the bus, how rigidly she sat, touching no one. An absence of fear, Elisa realizes, can be mistaken for happiness, but it isn’t the same thing. Not even close.”

“The effulgence of the theater lights eking through the floorboards and plastic are overwhelmed by the creature’s own rhythms of crystalline color, as if the sun itself is beneath them, and it is, it has to be, for they are in heaven, in God’s canals, in Chemosh’s slag, every holy and unholy thing at once, beyond sex into the seeding of understanding, the creature implanting within her the ancient history of pain and pleasure that connects not only the two of them but every living thin. It is not just him inside her. It is the whole world, and she, in turn, is inside it.”

“‘You deserve better than this. You deserve people who value you. You deserve to go somewhere where you can be proud of who you are.’
The voice, Lainie realizes, feels sovereign from her because it’s not only speaking to Giles Gunderson - it’s speaking to Elaine Strickland. She deserves better; she deserves to be valued; she deserves to live in a place where pride is not an exotic gift. Once more, the young wife and doddery gent are one and the same, stamped as deficient by people who haven’t the higher ground to make the accusation. Klein & Saunders is a start but only that: a start.”

“She reaches out to him. To herself. There is no difference. She understands now. She holds him, he holds her, they hold each other, and all is dark, all is light, all is ugliness, all is beauty, all is pain, all is grief, all is never, all is forever.”

“There are scars on my heart, just as thick, as disfiguring as those on my face. I know they’re there. I hope some undamaged tissue remains, a patch through which love can come in and flow out. I hope.”

“I was thirty years old, I realized, and I had never walked hand in hand with anyone. No one had ever rubbed my tired shoulders, or stroked my face. I imagined a man putting his arms around me and holding me close when I was sad or tired or upset; the warmth of it, the weight of it.”