The Hired Man

We became friends, I suppose, because we lived close to each other and it suited us and because when you are young friendships go unquestioned.

There's something uncomfortable about looking at pictures of your parents at a time when they made each other happy.

Here in the hills the rain washing down my face feels good. I lift up my head and open my mouth and let the water in, it is sweet, pure and sweet. I shield my eyes and look in the direction of the town, invisible behind the torrent of water. Let it run, I think, through the streets, down the gutters, into drains until it is carried away by the river. Let it wash away the shit and the pus and the blood, the things that can be washed away. But let it also wash away the fear and the malice and the spite, the things that are harder to erase.

Whenever he was asked what somebody had died of he'd reply (with immense gravity), "Lack of breath.

There's nothing new about this story of ours, such things happen. Love misses its mark, arrives too early or too late. Nobody dies, except in novels.

People said it was a song about drugs, but John Lennon said the name came from a picture his son painted of a girl at school.

I’d always kept an eye on the house. I don’t mean doing repairs, for as the house didn’t belong to me that was not my place, but rather I’d keep watch over its decline. The changes come slowly, like watching a woman age: another line, the spread of crow’s feet, age spots rising slowly to the surface. One day the face you know is ravaged.

For a long time, as I waited for her to return, I believed she knew I was there behind the trees and that this was my doing. That she knew I would come. For who else could it have been?

There are after all, and as Laura said, so many summers.