V.S. Kemanis Quotes

She'd discovered the beginnings of her adult person, her preference for lucidity, prudence, responsibility, and restraint. Tranquility could be eked from boredom, results from hard work.

Her immediate impulse was one of self-preservation. She was tied up in this somehow, she didn't know why or how, but there was something waiting for her on the other side of this crowd.

Pale blue. A vast empty expanse of it lay between them and the searing white disk hovering overhead. Nothing else. It could have been painted there, ripped from a paper ceiling, proving they didn't exist. None of it did. Best to lean back in the seat and feel the wind and hope to catch sight of something, an eagle, a cloud, a slight incline, a tumble weed, a curve in the highway.

Karen merely nodded a hello, feeling slightly apart despite the utter normalcy of the morning, feeling, for the first time, that she belonged to a secret, shameful society ruled by aberrant desire and behavior.

Her instincts were valid, another instinct told her.

No name, no number, but she remembered him, his eyes the color of shadow, his arms the shape of oblivion, a voice lulling her, beckoning her into the surf. His name was Brad or Tom or Steve ... or was it Rick? Ten years ago his voice had been the same, supplicating and tender with the promise of fairytale.

This congregation of displaced persons had been brought together at a moment in time, in this room, by a few irrevocable mistakes of the past - those acts of rage, greed, lust, and revenge that ran like silent films in their heads, the actors driven by emotions that had gone cold and were now inexplicable.

Rage and despair shook her for minutes or hours. She was unaware of the passage of time. Finally spent, she retreated inward and collapsed onto the floor in a fetal position, the letter in shreds around her. The room had grown dark. Like a gentle snowfall, the cold mantle of an unbearable silence descended.