House of Stone and Light

The wick toppled and dropped with a thin hiss and dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was.

It is many years now since the paintings of Pisanello instilled in me the desire to forfeit everything except my sense of vision. What appealed to me was not only the highly developed realism of his art, extraordinary for the time, but also the way in which he succeeded in creating the effect of the real, without suggesting a depth dimension, upon an essentially flat surface, in which every feature, the principals and the extras alike, the birds in the sky, the green forest and every single leaf of it, are all granted an equal and undiminished right to exist.

It’s Josephine we chose to carry our wounds grow cross-eyed burbled confused pins sticking out from all sides it’s Josephine we chose with her shrill cries and gestures her convulsive goings-on it’s Josephine we chose.

Milkman slipped into Sweet’s bed and slept the night in her perfect arms. It was a warm dreamy sleep all about flying, about sailing high over the earth. But not with arms stretched out like airplane wings, nor shot forward like superman in a horizontal dive, but floating, cruising, in the relaxed position of a man lying on a couch reading a newspaper. Part of his flight was over the dark sea, but it didn’t frighten him because he knew he could not fall.

We might could try it. I hate to go up there at all. Why is that? Old Lady’s put out with me. Well you got to go sometime. I know it. But sometimes I just purely hate it.

His father’s name was Jeremy a nearsighted madman raging against his five sons storms that demolished the house scattered the children left a hollow wailing at the center of each of them.

He was curious about these people. He didn’t feel close to them, but he did feel connected, as though there was some cord or pulse or information they shared. Back home he had never felt that way, as though he belonged to anyplace or anybody. He’d always considered himself the outsider in his family, only vaguely involved with his friends, and except for Guitar, there was no one whose opinion of himself he cared about.