The End of Everything

Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.

If we look at it from eye corners, or from places other than the center of our head, isn’t there a kind of terrible beauty in it?

I feel a shaking in me, and it's the ground. It's like the ground is shaking and I will slip through. Then, in a flash, his hands reach out and, like in a movie, really, the coffee cup falls to the cement steps with a sharp crack, and he grabs my arms and his face is filled with everything that is urgent and loving and meaningful in the world. I feel so powerful, like a god, thunderbolt in hand. And my thunderbolt hit.

Then she said sometimes the ways boys need things so badly, like they could never stop needing, it almost scared her.

Like all that you are is the wanting, and the rest of you just burns away?

Things can get pretty rough out there," he says. "Can't they? For you girls? You're all a bunch of warriors, aren't you? Lionhearted.

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof with three shingles and a pretty birdpath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs.Shaw, her tied back with a scarf, cleaning with a dainty skimmer. How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to bher bright magic?