All tagged Death
First lines of the novel I'm unable to write today:
"The old man stooped to pick up a handful of pine cones, pitched them into a large pail and reached for the Round-Up.
Slowly, carefully, he sprayed each weed that sprouted between the paving stones. Given more time — and if it were ten degrees cooler — he would have pulled them…”
First lines of the novel I had neither the time nor the inclination to write today:
"Santiago had lived a very good life. Although he had twice been married (and twice-divorced), he'd never had children. Now, at 79, his modest apartment and simple furnishings would certainly never lead one to guess he had nearly half a million dollars in the bank.
'Compound interest,' he used to say. "The most powerful force on the planet." And then he'd wink…”
First lines of the novel that today's barrage of tragic news left me too grief-stricken to write today:
”He arose from his seat in the waiting room — a place near the window which, after all these months, he'd actually come to think of as his own. The sliding doors whooshed open quickly, silently, and his eyes struggled against the blinding noonlight.
The young doctor's words — and the uncomfortable, bad-news grimace he hadn't yet perfected — still echoed, or rippled, like shockwaves, like... like...”
First lines of the novel, “The World It Kills Softly,” which I won’t write today, as it’s Independence Day:
“She lost him on a Tuesday. Together, they had grown up sharing everything. They were Irish twins — born nearly exactly nine months apart. Together, they had perfected forgiveness. They had perfected dreaming, manufacturing lives intertwined, raising nieces and nephews as their own. They didn’t bicker; she couldn’t remember a single argument.
The Leukemia finally took him on that Tuesday night in April of her senior year, just a few short months after the diagnosis…”
First lines of the novel I shamefully failed to write today:
"He awoke, feeling like Lazarus, back from the dead, as though he'd spent the evening dancing across the River Styx, and somehow survived--the protagonist of a postmodern novel, impossible to retell.
She lay beside him, still, sleeping in the morning light, smelling of used gin and cigar ash. The distance between them could not be bound by their king-sized bed. The world outside their apartment window was abuzz with the throbbing thrum of sirens…”
