To Be a Man: Stories

He could have broken her in two with one hand, but either she was already broken, or she wasn't going to break.

the people who arrive to us from nowhere and nothing are only ever that: a gift, received without having known to ask, with only the wonder of how life delivers and delivers.

I always feel a little pang of hurt that first day when darkness falls without warning. It’s the slight, sickening feeling of being reminded of the reckless authority of time, of losing your bearings in a world whose dimensions you thought you’d learned to live with.

The absurdity of believing that the decisions about who we love, and who we bind ourselves to, could be arrived at rationally? Or of assuming that we would be afforded a fair or natural death? Or did she mean the absurdity of having once believed in the possibility of dedicating one's life to anything beyond tomorrow, beyond just surviving? Or just the simple, long-standing absurdity of having lived a beginning that bore so little relation to the end?

It was an animal love, like an animal that has been living in an incomprehensible world until one day it encounters another of its kind and understands that it has been applying its comprehension in the wrong place all along.

One day I saw it: how she looked back at the man that j the business suit who stood across a subway car from her, burning a hole through her with his eyes. Her stare was a challenge.