Sky Full Of Elephants Quotes

White isn't a race, it's an idea.

If healing our wounds breaks the world, then let it break.

I don’t believe there has ever been a more terrible weapon in this world than the word they.

I've always thought of it like a sky full of elephants," Herald said absently, as though he weren't speaking to Charlie but to different versions of himself. "It's up there, been up there, heavy too. All wisdom and memory… sorrow. A weight so heavy it would damn us all if it came down. But you can't see it 'til you see it. No matter how many times I tell you they're up there, you can't see 'em until you see 'em.

Like her, all they knew, because all they'd been trained, was how well to suffer. And perhaps be rewarded by the consolation ot endurance. How does anyone begin to free themselves from the cycle of that type of conflict? Such struggle assumes an enemy one cannot punch or kick or kill. One that ravages memory and future alike. One no amount of apologies could satisfy. Conflict one lives with and tries, mightily, to live better than it demands.

Your value is decided on all the things you are willing to accept about yourself. And what you won't.

The monument reminded everyone in the city that some of its residents used to be somebody’s property. A threat, Vivian understood, packaged as heritage.

All power on Earth was built around what it could exploit. It leveraged, burned, absorbed. stored, and monetized every ounce of what the natural world could produce. Even solar power tapped the one sun in the sky, all systems and studies based on the measurements of monetization. One way, one sun. And we were all blinded.

Not all white people," Sidney added. "My mother wouldn't have been a part of this. She shouldn't' ve had to feel shame for something she didn't do." "Shouldn't she?" Sailor cut eyes at Charlie and then in the rearview mirror at Sidney. "Feeling what deserves to be felt is the only pathway to understanding. Let's get it straight: white folks did rape and steal and kill, and black folks died by the thousands-was dying all the way up 'til a year ago. Never feeling shame for that, and not allowing us to feel anger over it, means we don't evolve. We just go on repeating evil we can't understand. I'm sure your momma was a nice lady with a good heart, but her not feeling ashamed about all that happened is the same as not feeling anything at all.

They killed themselves. All of them. All at once. You could feel their absence in everything. On the subway. In the streets. In all the places the wild reclaimed. Where sunflowers grew through office buildings, over golf greens plagued red with ant mounds, where the earth crawled black up the sides of monuments, where all those Chihuahuas and cocker spaniels scavenged and begged in packs, their dog sweaters ragged, bedazzled collars dulled of sparkle. They killed themselves. One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.

It wasn’t hiding. The world conditioned us not to see it.” “See what, Uncle?” “The marvelous condition of being black. And that’s the most important thing I’ll ever give my daughter.

Charlie walked on, humbled that he’d not seen before the beauty of these black lives on full display. The creativity, love, and power intuitive with nature. Black bodies harboring all the magical qualities of soil.

She kept her speed, slowing only once near El Paso, where the sky bruised with a flaming storm, and beneath the storm a cluster of Indigenous people in brightly colored dresses and tasseled robes danced. Her chest fluttered when she saw them. All of the spirit of Texas prevailed in their movements.

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I suppose anything sounds righteous wher you pay it enough respect.

Too sudden did America fall into hands unprepared to hold its bounty. Too few knew how to fish. Too few could skin a buck. Too few understood how to run a farm, or the mechanics of a clock, or the variable shapes of government. Only a fragile structure remained, consequently, without the reinforcement of porcelain beams, ultimately punctuating precisely who'd made that system and kept charge of its maintenance.

But it isn't the world we have to remake, it's how we see ourselves in it.

White ain't a people. White is a spell they put on themselves. Losing they minds in it too much is probably what killed 'em. So there can't be a white colony, because white ain't an idea no more.

Belief is the first step on the path of being.

Anger, pride, sadness, respect, all rolling up into a word that again draped itself over his shoulders: father. As a uniform, father slid under teacher. Under prisoner. Under, even, man. His heart raced as Sidney disappeared into the crowd. Father. Once on, that uniform would be impossible to take off whether or not Charlie had any business wearing it. Of all the things a man could be, this was different.

Her mother's brother represented an idea whose belief and maintenance meant more to her mother than regret, more than honor, more even than love. An idea she'd blinded herself from seeing. That blindness, Sidney understood, was why her father never read the letter a second time. A blindness that confirmed for him his nightmare had an architect. Layers and layers built on top of him, professing how a prison for him made for others the sturdiest foundation.

The machine could not be calibrated. Shouldn't be. But Charlie accepted that he could find his own frequency within the signal's power. Through him, the signal could be channeled by its capacity to love without condition, harmonized through culture and community, and reminded that it was deserving of more than retribution, but a full existence prismatic with color. The machine healed Charlie. Charlie could heal the machine.

It's like poetry, what you've discovered here, Uncle Charlie," Herald said. "All this power hiding in the dark all this time.” "It wasn't hiding. The world conditioned us not to see it." "See what, Uncle?" “The marvelous condition of being black. And that's the most important thing I'll ever give my daughter.

Mardi Gras, just like his life, was no singular experience, but the beginnings of the carnival of the world, connecting lands and people. And then a hush dropped over the city.

Charlie stood up and wandered the edges of campus, watching without engaging. In this new world, he could figure neither where nor how he fit. Charlie had conflict in his heart long before the event. Before prison. All the way back to when he first learned to define himself by the language in the eyes of others, quick to articulate their bias. Ubiquitous enough for him to question the rationality of his very existence, the conflict of Charlie's darkness could only be resolved in the way any black man sees himself, that insoluble calculus. Does he see himself from within, as a divine composite of the joys, fears, hopes, and passions that make up any human being? Or does he see himself through the eyes of the world and how it reacted to him? His darkness was as elementary a question as it was existential: Who was he?

Judgment, he understood, was the chief function in the life of any man's daughter, To declare her father, in the simple courage of living her way through this world, as a man o value. Or not. In the harsh daylight, his conflict reorganized itself. He could never fully answer the equation of who he was or could be. But all he was to his daughter was an emptiness he could fill up with any version of himself he wanted That's what the daylight revealed. Within his daughter's innocence, a chance to reclaim his own.

He remembered how strange the feeling was to love the eyes condemning him.

That's all a family is: space to be odd.

Parenting isn't as much about them as it is about you. Don't matter who they are or who they want to be, you love and support them. Make space for it, understand? Not just raising them, but changing ourselves in the process. We spend too much time trying to wedge our children into something we think is right rather than following their lead. I don't want my child to carry what I carry, to feel what feel.

Last night was…” "As all good nights should be." And it was Good that filled Charlie to the brim and spilled over. He'd danced like he hadn't in decades. Danced like his body wanted to shake something out of itself. The magnitude of what he felt last night wasn't his alone. It was everyone's. Big love. Broad, sweeping, and all-consuming. Love that made you dance when you didn't want to Made you laugh so hard you stopped breathing. Made you want to feel everything, pushing him to hug, and dap, and hold on to the person next to him like magnets wedged between his joints Charlie, over the course of one night, felt that he'd recovered something profound and unnamable. And as he looked over at Seraphin's luminous black-gold body, he knew what he'd found last night he yet retained.

I ain't ever felt special my whole life. "What did you feel?" "Hard to explain. Felt like the opposite of special. Like a big black void moving through the world. Empty, if not for all the people trying to fill it with their own judgments on me." "The thing about voids, Charlie Brunton, is ain't nothing inside of them but light they can' figure out how to free.

I kept thinking, What a strange fruit we are to have never ripened. Hung, dangled, sweetened, eaten, but never just filled up with the miracle of ourselves. We had to heal, Charlie. We had to.

Her tears grieved all the holes in her history. Up until then, her life was all black and white, leaving her unprepared for so much gray.

We finally inherited the earth and can't remember who we was back when it was promised to us to begin with.

Lucky because the world has tried to destroy me in every kind of way, but I am still here. So are you. So are a lot of good people. Ain't no other people in the history of the world ever had so little of a serving of living as us. And now, we got all of it.

Charlie watched his own child hold the gun with a concentration he'd witnessed many times before, a focus that did not see a life in its scope only threats, deserving—all of them, regardless of offense—equal penance.

He'd resolved to keep his secrets from her, but seeing the fury in her eyes, he couldn't bear to lie to her face. Some part of him felt she'd experienced just as many lies as he had. And pain, whether sugared in falsities or tart with truth, was still pain.

She didn't smile often but pursed her lips, seeming to almost protect herself from even the curl of a smirk. His memory felt her warmth but visualized the heat as an alertness, eyes watching, darting questioning, on guard for something a young Charlie hadn't endured enough yet to see. The truth of her fears revealed themselves in the way she gripped his arm when they crossed a street, in the hard honesty that would not allow him to be naive, in even the way she stuck kisses on his forehead that felt like punctuations. His recollection of childhood was blushed red with love, but understood that red as more a terror in focus. She feared everything because everything seemed coiled up to injure her son while in the simple activity of living life. Feared like he just dangled out there, naked, blind, and alone, prey to something he couldn't stop no matter how hard he tried.

At the cruising height, Charlie could see how little light still burned in the country below. So much of the land cloaked in darkness. All the space between cities and towns, connecting mountains to rivers, shore to shore. The darkness held America together. Looking down at a black immensity, Charlie saw the darkness as its own kind of beauty, experiencing for once the full shape of it, its beginning endless, its end ceaselessly moving. A form that held all the power of the universe and, without sound or grievance, gave every bit of that power all away. For once, Charlie admired the darkness down there and in himself until that deep black reached out, swallowed his eyes, and carried him off to sleep.

Indeed, as Charlie gazed over the city, the technology, operations, all infrastructural underpinnings, felt familiar. Ancient even. As though this Mobile had long existed in a parallel reality, one in which the trajectory of these people's lives centuries of American cruelty had not warped. On this other plane of existence, the king and his people went on without trauma or fear, unbent to whips and guns, to be fulfilled in the wonder of themselves. Just over a year had passed since the event, and with the change, Charlie sensed, this version of Mobile was transported as though its genius had always been here. A city filled with resonant people and colorful energy. "I don't understand how this exists," Charlie spoke out loud, more to himself than anyone. "You're looking at this place like it came out of nowhere," the leaner son, Herald, responded. "But you can feel it, can't you? Been here Always. Above and below.

Family, Charlie saw, in skin, in bone, in spirit, impossible to bury, chain down, or educate out of the mind. Only in pieces could he remember the last meal he had with his mother. He couldn't remember what they ate or what they talked about, only the feeling: family. Twenty years in prison did everything it could to erase family from Charlie's heart. And yet, as good roots often do, family remained.

Breaking, burning. Sidney danced harder, aware of how the movement blended her into everyone dancing in the street. And the riling felt so very good. To cry, scream, sweat, and laugh through the physicality. Remaking her in the therapy of something primal. The more she danced, the more a tremendous lump inside her gave way, The beat bopped in her bones. Her muscles swelled of joy. Freedom. Laughter as a form of movement that popped, rocked, allowed her to slip free of herself and be gone into the rhythm. Burning up. Boiling. Steaming. So hot she spiraled upward. They all did. Far away from everything. Hot and bright as stars. Together in cosmic unity. A constellation right there in the streets of Mobile. Sidney welcomed the sensation. That she could be both alone and together. Down to the core. Down where everything and everyone blended into the dimension behind her eyelids connected, finally, in a living darkness. While the rhythm lasted there were no sides. No lines in the sand. No walls. No them. No they. Only us. Alone and together. Like the fine molecules of a mountain.

All a person needs sometimes is to be asked how they feel.

There, she danced. She wasn't running toward something or away, wasn't knotted in questions or unraveling with answers. The heat and the dark and the music took her with neither shame nor sadness.

Sidney fell asleep that night on the beach dunes thinking about her father. Was he a good man or a criminal? Did love guide his heart, or did revenge sharpen his mind? Was the sum of him all of those things she believed and more, her father's blackness as multitudinous as the stars in the soil of the sky? As darkness deepened into dreams, she spoke back to the stars: I don't know him, but I'd like to. Knowing him is knowing me. Knowing him is knowing me.

See, everything's energy. Our whole lives are made up of sharing energy between each other. Something lingers when energy transforms out of this living state to another state. These bones are fresh enough to still influence the transformed energy that left this three-dimensional world.

No one else wanted to be a black person in America. And everyone knew that fact, however cruelly the result played itself out. No matter the worry in their lives, they could all but count on a voice, redemptive and default, Whispering as a comfort to their hearts: At least I'm not them. And so they carried on, the injustice of it as natural and inconvenient to their lives as a bit of rain.

But like the bulk of a mountain broken down by wind and water, truth devolves. With enough lies, one cannot defend himself with his own truth no more than stone can stop a river. So, what is a truth when fact is no longer accepted as true? Charlie's courtroom verdict made its own facts about him, facts prison eagerly endorsed. The years to follow meant he no longer had to think about truth or lies anymore. What happened happened. And there wasn't enough truth in all the world to change it.

Mississippi is the shadow, the soul, and the skeleton closet of the nation. If America had ruins, Mississippi would be it. Every step you take got blood in the soil,

Desperation used to be the engine that turned the world. But it is not the engine of this new one.

What did Nona claim so much of and Sidney so little? What spells had been spoken into Nona's ears to help her find the source of herself, when the voice in Sidney's mind repeated the same verse: You're not worthy?

For when finally Sidney allowed her emotions to settle, she recognized herself in Nona. She'd seen, before, something in the way Nona moved in the twinkle of stars at night. She heard, before, the sound of Nona's voice in river depths. She'd felt, before, Nona's skin flash in the soil breaking in her hands. She'd no name for that familiarity, but whatever the kinship could be called, she understood that the elusive attribute had lived in the glass house with her all along. Made small, insignificant, but nevertheless inextinguishable and ever present. She needn't have claimed that kinship for that kinship to have always claimed her.

For a third of their day they seemed to freely give what was in them to be given, whatever passion woke them each morning and just spilled over. From what Charlie saw, those passions included building things, growing things, teaching, dancing, learning. People seemed to almost become themselves simply by offering what they loved doing most. Another third of their day dedicated time for growing, strengthening the body, the mind, the heart. All over the city, people gathered together in groups talking, eating, training, learning history, planning futures, accepting all the things others had to give. The method of erudition struck him as similar, in many ways, to Howard, where classrooms and schedules could not contain learning. And there was so much to learn, new things and old, equaled only by a willingness to teach. Spirituality, in the last third of their days, played a formless role in the lives of the Mobile people. Some prayed on their knees to gods in the earth. Some shook runes in their palms and dipped bones in blood to access the lessons of the dead. Some stood face up at the bases of obelisks, their serene expressions brightly painted in the light of the sun. Charlie acknowledged the spirituality in everything, an awareness of magic and gods and spirits. But no defined religion. The people of Mobile dreamt. They meditated. They communed with something higher, seemingly capable of sensing the subtlest energies.

How deeply buried that feeling throbbed inside her. Not just buried, but fractured, broken into so many parts over so many years that right and wrong might never again be redeemed, and yet she could still feel its certainty. Like how all stars could seem a universe broken into shards or, on a clear night, the singular luster of that which refuses to be forgotten.

Young black boys, Charlie thought, the most marvelous beings in the universe. As nonchalantly as Herald bit into that fruit did black boys ever ponder their influence on the whole world. How effortlessly they rounded the shape of the earth with their swagger and illuminated its days with their creativity. Their hope, Charlie mused, offered even the bleakest parts of our planet a second sun.

Because history didn't start with slavery, and stealing us here cut us off from twenty-five thousand years of memory.

The kind of food we ate, how we played, how we couldn't stop ourselves from dancing if the right song hit—hell, even how we talk shit to each other. We're connected. We all know it. In every city where black people live, so does that subtle consciousness. Togetherness. Us-ness. How we dance, how we love, how we hope. Everywhere it's basically intuitive, as these are the manifestations of a signal buzzing all around us, all the time, all over the world.

There is no amount of deceit that can erase memory in the bones. We have never forgotten. Change is coming, and memory always prevails My dear, be free to choose your own way, but try your best to really understand where it is you're going.

Charlie understood, in a way, that was just how the world now felt: blind, or all vision warped by having worn someone else's glasses.

What if you just let go of everything you've been taught about right and wrong-forget what your schoolteacher said, your church pastor; forget about your Girl Scout leader-and you just tried to feel right and wrong in your bones, in your heart-would you still think what they are doing is wrong?

She felt shame so strong it turned itself inside out, leaving the sole emotion in her body a sudden, red-hot trustration.

The world has already changed-yanked right out of the hands of anybody trying to go backward—be backward. It changed. Period and forever. What you're scared of is the burden of changing yourself along with it.

We are the feeling folk, Charlie thought, who sparkle of magic and vigor. Who laugh like laughter is a gift to be given and sing like we have always been the chorus of angels. The feeling folk who allow the skin of the world to glide over us, rugged and tender, absorbed into the gospel of our empathies. The feeling folk who dance to songs in our heads because we know those songs source from a heart beating since the beginning. The feeling folk who heal right side in, wielding a power to make a history of horrors evaporate like steam from a stewpot. Power to make any place home. So, in his dream, Charlie thought only of us. The noble We. Not our dreams either, or even hopes. But the enormity. All the colors and energies and outcomes swallowed up to make a community of individuals never alone. No picket fences or pageantry, just open doors and all the space and time one needs to be oneself. We are energies, Charlie dreamt, constantly exchanging and mixing and charging.

She followed them underwater until she could no longer breathe and swam back for air. Until she could no longer see anything in those depths. Until she no longer had strength to keep diving down. And she tried. Swimming, screaming, fighting. She tried her very best. To drown herself along with them. To feel what they felt. As she had been trying to all her life.

And there were no lights on in the houses he passed. No movement at all. Only the vastness of the road, the treasure of America's immensity abandoned by its keeper. Nearly an entire nation seemed, suddenly, discoverable. He wondered if this was what Columbus felt: to look upon something already there with nothing to stop you from claiming every mile as yours.

I don't believe there has ever been a more terrible weapon in this world than the word they.

I like to think we are all just a recipe of different parts. My mother says that no one can give you your wholeness. You just have to claim it.

We discovered there were other ways to live. When our time came to come back to America, we brought those ways with us. And, no, Mobile is not the paradise you imagine, at least not yet. But we came to learn paradise is the mind. What you believe about yourself. What you know about yourself. We have a lot of work to do, and we know it will never be perfect. But better is a direction. As long as we progress, together, we will be all right. Mobile is movement. We are all movement.

All that emotion, all that rage in the sky, poured out the way it did because for so long no one tended to it. No one cared about our sadness, or grief, or pain—none of it. And you know exactly what I mean. To be left in the darkness so long you become darkness. All I did was open the door and set it free the way it deserved to be.

As they walked together, she told Sidney that her ancestors fought for their freedom on Haiti only to immigrate to America, free people, and be treated as second class or worse. Sidney sank into the music of the queen's voice and listened to her chronicle just how bad the country was for her grandmother and her mother, and that even as a child she could feel what all those years did to people's minds. Their spirits. Their sense of self. Generation after generation of people running away from themselves just to try to belong to something that had affirmatively defined them as other.

You people were already killing each other like animals.” "You love to think that everything you put in a cage is an animal. But I know there's no cage that will hold me if you call my people animals again.

How different her life would have been to know the stories in the curls of her hair. Would she still carry his conflict? Would she come to see her darkness as elemental, magic woven into her essence? Would she accept herself completely? And, in teaching her, would he have learned to accept himself?

Charlie had no real words to answer the question. What troubled him at the precipice of changing the world was the same thing that had troubled him all his life. The conflict. She asked to see the real Charlie, and he wasn't sure that Charlie even existed anymore, swallowed up in the darkness of that conflict. Back across the bulk of his life, no one ever really saw that Charlie.

Students flirted and smiled at each other as effortless as sunlight on a breeze. So much life and so much energy. Easy to forget that half the world died. But then again, Charlie noted, neither grief nor calamity had ever stopped the joy of black people. We smiled through the worst the world had to offer, he thought. Smiled even when our lips bled.

So little life lived between the both of them. So few chances to spread themselves out across the canvas of just being. As he looked out at the road before them, he felt hope for all the life yet to be lived.

Let yourself feel it. Feel all of it. Then dance with me until it burns up, until you can finally stop apologizing for being who you are. You can't go backward and there's nothing you need to settle to go forward.

She could feel the tension. A collection of laws, beliefs, and stereotypes wound tight with the maintenance of its own form. Wound tight with all the ways a thing should be, tighter still in the faith that this was the way things had always been: a world safe in a firm grip. She didn't see white, but she felt the force of it. Like seeing a childhood toy as an adult, knowing all the places you've changed by seeing how an old thing hadn't changed at all.

Us had bloomed from Sidney's mouth as leaves on branches. Us was in her and outside of her now.

Oppressors really hear us, they very literally couldn't live with themselves?

At the cruising height, Charlie could see how little light still burned in the country below. So much of the land cloaked in darkness. All the space between cities and towns, connecting mountains to rivers, shore to shore. The darkness held America together. Looking down at a black immensity, Charlie saw the darkness as its own kind of beauty, experiencing for once the full shape of it, its beginning endless, its end ceaselessly moving. A form that held all the power of the universe and, without sound or grievance, gave every bit of that power all away. For once, Charlie admired the darkness down there and in himself until that deep black reached out, swallowed his eyes, and carried him off to sleep.

You can't deny the truth of it: it's scary and it's unknown. That's a fact. But it's also a fact that scary and unknown is how everything has always been.

The south has always been a monarchy in some form or another. Everybody thinks they're the king of something here. People, land business. That's why you'd hear them talk about their manors and their birthrights and societies all of them, carrying on like royals in court. having balls and cotillions while people was going off to war. Wouldn't be the first time some fool in Alabama claimed themselves lord of everything.

You ain't a man. You a knot. A conflict. Empty and full at the same time. I know what it's like to have to hold back everything you feel and feel that shit anyway. You're sad, you're lonely, confused, more pissed off than you know what to do with. But what you don't seem to understand is anger is a vital part of the human experience. Without understanding the shape of yours, you'll never be a full human being. I don't hesitate when I say I'm angry as hell. Will be probably until the day that I die. And more than that, I deserve to be. I'm still mad that every single person who walked into the water didn't get to feel what I feel-to know it. Because they deserved to.

Enormity is what it felt like. Something so colossal it galloped like chariots, surged like a wave, spread out and towered at the same time. So much, so wide, so deep. Ferocious ecstasy. Emotion. Wisdom. Mania. Heavy and primal. An ocean of teeth. Time sharpened into needles. Blood. Soil. Water. All the dark magnitudes of space crystallized into a single sensation. All of that resonance descending on Charlie at once. And yet, what he felt in that incomprehensible enormity was his. Personal. Filling him and swallowing him up simultaneously. More than anything, the sensation released him. God, did it release him into a place beautiful only in that it was exquisitely complete. The enormity took Charlie's breath away, and he felt for once the holy fullness of his own denied reactions. His darkness, now whole, bursting forth.

Sit at the feet of feminine energy and just listen. Woman'll tell you everything we need to do, everything we want, is here already. Been here. It's just we've been using the wrong tools to access it.

Back then I was walking right into people's homes in the projects and in the ghettos. All the welfare in the world couldn't help them from what they suffered. When couldn't bear the social work anymore, I went into psychology, hoping maybe I could understand, deep down, the impact of their traumas-what it was that made their ascent nearly impossible. Psychology led to me studying history and seeing the real scope of how we got here. Do you really understand how long four hundred years of suffering is, Charlie? And that's just on these shores. What that does to the mind, it's hard to comprehend. Especially when it was still happening. So I started speaking, calling it out, doing everything I could to stop it so a collective healing could finally begin. But it was like trying to move a mountain. And so I learned quickly that the only way to move a mountain is to shake the earth. That don't have a thing to do with them. The mountain is us. The mountain is our minds. The mountain is our hope. That's how Haitians won their freedom against all odds. They found themselves together on the same frequency.

We'd been looking to the daylight to save us, when all it did was hide and diffuse the power. Night waited for our eyes to come home. Charlie understood the stars didn't just twinkle and burn—they sang, just like us. Across the dark distance of space every star vibrated, a song belted through time—the music of life—offering more power than ever produced. All our ancestors looked up at the same night sky. In the dark, under ancient, cosmic sparkle, they found their gifts. In the dark they evolved math and poetry and song, found the language of themselves. In the dark, they discovered infinite power, black power, a heritage of and beyond the world.

ON THE DISCOMFORT OF BEING IN THE SAME ROOM AS THE BOY YOU LIKE Everyone is looking at you looking at him. Everyone can tell. He can tell. So you spend most of your time not looking at him. The wallpaper, the floor, there are cracks in the ceiling. Someone has left a can of iced tea in the corner, it is half-empty, I mean half-full. There are four light bulbs in the standing lamp, there is a fan. You are counting things to keep from looking at him. Five chairs, two laptops, someone’s umbrella, a hat. People are talking so you look at their faces. This is a good trick. They will think you are listening to them and not thinking about him. Now he is talking. So you look away. The cracks in the ceiling are in the shape of a whale or maybe an elephant with a fat trunk. If he ever falls in love with you, you will lie on your backs in a field somewhere and look up at the sky and he will say, Baby, look at that silly cloud, it is a whale! and you will say, Baby, that is an elephant with a fat trunk, and you will argue for a bit, but he will love you anyway. He is asking a question now and no one has answered it yet. So you lower your eyes from the plaster and say, The twenty-first, I think, and he smiles and says, Oh, cool, and you smile back, and you cannot stop your smiling, oh, you cannot stop your smile.

vehicles to the side. They exited the trucks to start their search for the elephants that Drago had found earlier. Their heavy black boots crushed all plant life in their path. Drago took a moment to glance up at the sky. The moon was full, a good sign, with the moon lighting their way to fortune. Drago turned to the others. “We’ll see them better tonight.” A chorus of agreements came. Drago nodded to the side of the road and the men took up watch for the creatures that would soon make them richer than their wildest dreams. The fact that they would be destroying precious life in the process meant absolutely nothing to them. Greed was now fueling every inch of their brains. They sat and waited.

They killed themselves. One morning, every white person in America walked into the nearest body of water and drowned.

Darkness beyond dimension. Darkness beyond beautiful.

The darkness held America together. Looking down at a black immensity, Charlie saw the darkness as its own kind of beauty, experiencing for once the full shape of it, its beginning endless, its end ceaselessly moving. A form that held all the power of the universe and, without sound or grievance, gave every bit of that power all away.

She longed for the shape of the rifle in her hand. How easily the gun made the world change the way she wanted.

You ain’t a man. You a knot. A conflict. Empty and full at the same time. I know what it’s like to have to hold back everything you feel and feel that shit anyway. You’re sad, you’re lonely, confused, more pissed off than you know what to do with. But what you don’t seem to understand is anger is a vital part of the human experience.

The stars, Charlie saw, were not exclusively stars but messages too, reaching through the blackness of space. Looking up at the dazzle of lights, briefly Charlie understood those messages and himself within them. He could be a radio, tuned in to the knowledge above him—all that was, is, and will be was his to hear.

Your value is decided on all the things you are willing to accept about yourself. And what you won’t.

She sensed ghosts in the land. Their whispers.

The enormity broke Charlie apart, but his brother held him up.

Don’t play fool, Charles. You already know. How anybody supposed to build a new life on top of so much cruelty and pain? If I could’ve, I would have burned it down to the bones of the world. Down to the foundation. You understand me?

Judgment. Judgment, he understood, was the chief function in the life of any man’s daughter. To declare her father, in the simple courage of living her way through this world, as a man of value. Or not.