Words&Dirt

“She turned to face south and the whole field lifted to her eyes as a single reflected sheet of brightness.  An ocean, stippled and roiling in waves over submerged rock and rill, rising as she watched.  She felt the reckless thrill of being at sea.  Like Columbus on his ship, maybe, after he’d spent his life begging himself into debt, getting cornered.  In no other way could a person strike out for probable disaster at the edge of the known world.  Insofar as a person could understand that, she did.

On the hill behind her crows flew one by one into the bare trees, arranging their dark blots in the scrim of branches and adding their warnings to the drear sounds of this day.  Gone, gone, they rasped.  Here was a dead world learning to speak in dissonant, unbearable sounds.  The topsoil, the slim profit margin of this farm, the ground itself, rushed away from her, and when water spilled over her boots again she backed slowly into the violent current to find a better place.”

––Flight Behavior, by Barbara Kingsolver, pg. 431

“It cleared everything up and now we could all start from the beginning again.  Philip could live his life and we could live ours.  The beautiful things of the world, I had been wrong about them.  They meant everything.  They were the only things that meant anything.”

––The Butcher Boy, by Patrick McCabe, pg. 79