“She turned her head and looked up at the thin cracks in the ceiling. Her eyes traced the ruptures above them and Lizzie wondered what it might make it collapse. He turned his head and grabbed her face so her eyes would meet his, touched his nose to hers.”
“Some guy I must’ve known threw his hand over the glass to block me. He mouthed something I couldn’t hear, as if we were underwater, and tapped his finger on the side of the glass. Someone’s phone flashlight blinded me as it attempted to illuminate what was in it. Someone screeched.”
“For a moment, Allen just stared at the kettle. The room felt smaller, like the air had thickened. He thought of Ryan, of work, of losing the job, and the apartment, and everything else, and then looked back at the kettle’s bright little screen, now a meadow in the wind, calm, and endless.”
“That could be anyone, I think. The beach, the cliffs, the moon, just something with a voice that sounds like Margaret. The ocean could have picked up her accent and dissolved it, carried what I know as Margaret—black hair, sports bra, raspy voice—and released its latent sound into the cold wind, back to me. A lure.”
“She stood there, shuddering in place. She shook from the cold, from the fear, from the pain. She shook for what she had lost — something she knew could not be put back. For she now understood that Fear was not something lodged in her chest like shrapnel, but rather something that was taken away.”
“Not long after that we realized there was little else to do where we were, so we stood up and headed out, us two boys stumbling through the cold night behind Mary.”
“It was one of those topsy-turvy Wednesday evenings in New York when one feels like they’ve fallen through a manhole and landed in New Amsterdam: when everything feels offputting and unusual in occurrence.”
“He reached out again to the metal, which seemed to bend out towards him too, its soft surface embracing his hand once more. The chain rang out again in the cold, cutting wind, which swirled around him.”
“She imagined the dalmatian loved humans more than he loved dogs. She imagined him to be obsessed with fetch, to be the sort of dog who’d pause dinnertime to pick up a tennis ball. She imagined him to be sweet, to love scratches behind the ear and to snore when he slept.”
