"Tiger's Wife"

[fiefoe]

Grandfather:

• I will not remember this as sentimentality, but as greatness.
• “Fuck. You go looking for a gnat and you find a donkey.”
• I see it all, and, later, there is the fact that he wants me to have seen.
• the pattern into which we had fallen as a family over the years, the tendency to lie about each other’s physical condition and whereabouts
• ... how he wouldn’t bring me with him anymore if I insisted on sounding like a weasel in a potato sack,
• memories of grace meaningless to anyone else— ...  A hazy yellow moon was climbing along the curve of the old basilica on the hill. As it rose, it seemed to be gathering the silence up around it like a net.
• “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone. Not just the people involved in it, but the people who write newspapers, politicians thousands of miles away, people who’ve never even been here or heard of it before. But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us.”
• My grandfather, a frowning and irritated sentry, extracting the chief of rheumatology from where he had fallen into the rosebushes.
• My grandfather pulled feet and feet of infected intestine out of the Marshall’s body in great red loops over his shoulder, and several bystanders—the innkeeper, assorted security personnel, probably a nurse or two, all terrified into competency.
• But I remember that, even though he knew he was going to spend the night in dirt and ash, he shined his shoes.

It's still slow going, wading through all those descriptive passages, but it's not unrewarding.
__ a tender kind of frenzy that comes from unexpected weather
__ "Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?"
__ the strain in her eyes had unbuckled
__ beneath lines of electric cable... now hung broken and black as jungle creeper.
__ bright as a blood moon /  the spinal column, like a braid of bone
__ It wasn’t dawn yet, and there was a fine pink sheen to the air, as translucent as a fish.
__ the pandemic news of her insolence
__ the last word in all the world falls to

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