The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow

Love transcended loss long enough for them to find that the depth of feeling is best known in silence, because in the presence of such love words are never quite enough.

She opened her heart and her home to her Purpose, and waited for it to come in.

Their hands never touched, not even in an accidental brushing, and that was a good thing, for real intimacy has a dawn.

The day was so wonderful that Bonaventure thought it would taste like cherry pie if he took a bite of it.

The mirror done broke and your life looking back at you from them sharp glass pieces.

She did not believe in random. God does not deal in random.

The fire sings to the marshmallow, and the song turns the marshmallow brown because that's what marshmallows do when they're happy.

The mind can take in many things, but it cannot take in God.

Before long the formed into a circle, and neither of them could imagine being a straight line again, caught in the loneliness of blunt severed ends.

Please God, please God, can you please tell me why? I ask this of you, yet in my heart, I know.

From inside Dancy's warm, safe womb Bonaventure heard two voices singing, and his little heart beat out a raining tattoo as if to keep in time with the song. He had no suspicion that anything had changed, because for him they had not; he'd always known these two voices, one soft, one deep and had always found them soothing.

His listening intensified day by day until he could hear the adagio movement of a nucleus inside an electron aria that floated through the operatic galaxy inside a single atom. And then he began to hear extra... In the case of the marmalade spoon, the whir of the bluebottle fly was more than a buzzing, it also spoke of the splendor of courage. That was the extra part.

The could never have explained Bonaventure anyway because there is no scientific word for miraculous.

One time Bonaventure heard the graphite of a pencil rasp across a piece of paper and leave a slight and quivered mark behind. He listened so hard he heard the graphite's history, when it was still a part of metamorphic rock that didn't know it would one day almost capture what was almost a thought from the mind of an insane man.

And you gots a Purpose too. Your Purpose gonna show itself when the time be right.

Bonaventure Arrow could travel the world through the abundant good graces of his silence.

-I'm glad you're my dad. I love your sound. William took that to mean 'I love you' for sound was all he was to Bonaventure. 'I love you too,' he said.

He had figured out that thoughts exist in silence and have no colour or sound or shape until they are turned into words. Spoken words exist in the mind first and then go to the voice and sit temporarily inside ears, and if words are conveyed through sign language, they exist in the motion of hands.

Bonaventure always liked pictures because even though they had no mouths they managed to speak.

Bonaventure heard the determination behind the Wanderer's library deed. It sounded like a thousand marching boots.

Lord knows, nobody understand where love come from if not from inside a mystery.

Bonaventure could hear The Wanderer's regret. It made the sound of burned skin that cannot scab over because it is too far gone.

The music interrupted mockingbirds and cardinals and half-hour church bells. It was at times orchestral and at times a cappella, a mighty love song made of lullaby, angel chant, opera, and hymn. There were the tap water and scissor sounds of wished-for beauty; the gumball rattle of giant kindness; the crinkly-page sounds meant for Creathie LaRue; the joyful, last-sip gurgle from Bixie’s Luncheonette; the moist-earth sounds of healing; the echo of wind in trees; the pinging of broken sunlight; and the courageous buzzing of a bluebottle fly all mixed together in a wonderful, powerful, magical gris-gris.