Christine Falls

When you think of the material God has to work with,” he said, “you have to feel sorry for Him, sometimes.

In the hallway of the house there was the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood, if childhood was the word for that first decade of misery he had suffered through.

She had that look - scared and sort of paralysed but frantic underneath - that girls got when they could think of only the one thing. It was a look that told him it would be her first time.

He felt as if he had come to the end of a road on which he had been traveling for so long his trudging on it had begun to seem a state of rest, a rest however which afforded him no respite but made his bones ache and his heart labor and his mind go dull.

Somewhere along that difficult way he seemed to have got lost.

He thought of the sea out there beyond the garden, the waves a dark, muddy mauve, swallowing the endless fallings of frail flakes. Rose too was looking toward the windows and the slanted, moving whiteness beyond.

The snow outside was falling fast now, he fancied he could hear the huge, busy whisper of it as it swamped the air and settled on the already blanketed lawn and on the invisible terraces and stone steps and graveled walkways.

Doors as he opened them clicked their tongues in annoyed unwelcome and, when he was leaving, closed behind him sighingly, glad of his quittance.

lay back smiling and opened her arms and took him so deeply inside her he knew he would never quite find his way out again.

not she, exactly, but a remembrance of her, rancid with resentment and old anger.

This was his sustenance, Quirke realized, this was what was keeping him alive, a thin bitter gruel of memories and imaginings, of malice and vindictive amusement

They stood and gazed into that glowing gray immensity as if it were the very heart of desolation.

He had gone beyond Sarah, into another, darker place, a place of his own behind another doorway like the doorway through which often in the past she had invited him, in vain, to enter with her.

on left turns she leaned so far to the side that Quirke felt stray tendrils of her hair touch his cheek like filaments of charged electric wire.

was Saturday and the front of the place was shut and silent like a clenched mouth.

All of Quirke’s earliest, orphaned past was like this, an absence fraught with consequence, a resonant blank.

That’s what they do in America. I had a pen pal who was putting herself through college. That’s what she wrote, I’m putting myself through college. Imagine.

the usual smell he could never identify, brownish, exhausted, a breath out of childhood,

Quirke prized his loneliness as a mark of some distinction.