hospitable grass helpless

Hospitable grass helpless

Phil didn’t run away. Later he explained that he felt as though he were literally stuck in place. All he could do was remove the flashlight from his pocket, let it hang at his side toward the gutter, and flip the switch. On and off, on and off. A spot of light on the cement, unsteady, and then gone, and then there again. He had on his mind at that moment two things: first, a number, and then a name. The number 165—decibels — occurred and reoccured to him. Then came the name: “dolma”—he’d remembered the name of the food Gaspar’s sister made for him when he’d first moved into the park as a teenager, alone at seventeen. She removed the stems from grape leaves, and then boiled the leaves and rice separately. In a large bowl, she used her hands to mix the rice and the tomatoes and the lemon juice she squeezed in there, careful to pluck out any seeds that might have crept in. She said that in Armenia, she had her own grapevines and her own lemon tree, and the taste — you couldn’t imagine the taste of a real grape leaf, the strange sweetness of an Armenian lemon. Then she filled the grape leaves, spread across a cutting board now, with the stuffing she’d created in the bowl — you can use meat, she said while she did it, you can use lamb or you can use beef, but why not spare a life? She poured salt into the center of her palm and spread it over the rice on the leaves just before rolling them perfectly into little green tubes. You could see her fingers shine there with the juices and the oils of the dolmas, but it didn’t seem to bother her. She was a beautiful woman. Once, she’d been — plucking lemons from a branch — a beautiful girl, and Phil felt for her and for all of them. “Had I been invited, I would very much have enjoyed seeing this yacht,” said Dimitri in a delightfully casual way. Enduring miseries like a woman in a war-torn country. Dead right, and they’re tailing us. * * * MANY FACES are made in such a way that any one part of them can live an independent life that is unconnected to the face or the individual associated with it, like a part that has survived the death of the body and is now a ghost. These parts of the face are little used, more often than not— think of someone with glassy eyes or a frozen upper lip — and, with their lack of use, point either to death or a former life, despite their independence. I loved him, she repeats. He’s really great, I say. But he’s nothing like me. The baby loves to look at photos of babies. And at drawings of babies. And although she doesn’t play with other babies often, she observes them on the street with an especial interest, with much more interest than she gives to a similarly aloof adult. Albeit with less attention than she would give to a dog. It’s a very particular kind of interest, a mirror interest, I am guessing. She doesn’t know yet that she is going to get bigger. She doesn’t yet know that she will become one of us. We are of the large species; she is of the small species. “Lead used in balls made on the frontier is melted in dirty molds over campfires and cookstoves, making it crude and dirty. This has no impurities. It was a bullet made for a gentleman’s gun, one of those expensive English fowling pieces I wager. The ball that hit Red Jacob was bigger, a heavy musket ball. Two weapons. Two men.” Duncan turned back with a new glint in his eye. He knew with certainty what Jahoska had wanted for them.“We’re not just escaping, Jamie,” he declared. “We are stopping them.” “Not all of us. There’s still much to be done in the northern theater.” “That’s okay,” I said. “Boys feel the urgency more than women.” You’re not alone? he asks. Now the moon hangs unfragmented over the violet edge of the glacier, a moon of white opal, with a pattern similar to the imprint of a coin rubbing. Duncan slowly nodded at Alice Dawson, standing in the doorway in a dressing gown. She sobbed and sank into a chair by the door, tears flowing down her cheeks..

Michael Beeson's Research

Hospitable grass helpless