罪火

• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  That was both the best and worst part, that all that happened was the unintended consequence of a good person’s mistakes.……But that was the way life worked. Every human being was the result of a million different factors mixing together—one of a million sperm arriving at the egg at exactly a certain time; even a millisecond off, and another entirely different person would result. Good things and bad—every friendship and romance formed, every accident, every illness—resulted from the conspiracy of hundreds of little things, in and of themselves inconsequential.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  It felt like hubris. Rejecting your natural place in the world and using an alien machine to defy gravity and dislocate yourself to another continent.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  She would ask the questions that remained and tell the stories still untold. She would do all this, eventually—in a minute or an hour, or a day. But standing still right here, feeling the weight of her daughter’s body leaning against hers, her warm breath on her neck—for now, that was all she needed.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  How beautiful it was this morning, when her life was collapsing, as if God were mocking her and confirming her irrelevance.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Maybe all families with only child were in this way, inequality in closeness and the resulting envy being inherent in all three-person groups.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  He’s a little weird and likes talking about rocks or whatever. He’s not Mr. In-Crowd, never will be. And I think you are hoping you can change him into the kid you want instead of the kid you have. But no kid’s perfect, and you can’t get him to be perfect through more treatments.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  To Koreans, being sparing with words signaled gravitas, but to Americans, verbiage was an inherent good, akin to kindness or courage. They loved words—the more, the longer, and more quickly said, the smarter and more impressive. Quietness, Americans seemed to equate with an empty mind—nothing to say, no thoughts worth hearing—or perhaps sullenness.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  She felt hot shame sweeping through her, head to toe, side to side, each sweep flooding her in torrents. And anger, a piercing sense of unfairness: she’d had white boyfriends, but no on accused her of harboring a Caucasian fetish. And she had friends who’d dated only blondes or Jewish women or Republican men (by coincidence or intent, no on knew or cared), but they didn’t get accused of having a blonde fetish or Jew fetish or Republican fetish. But take any non-Asian guy who’s dated at least two Asian Women—well, that was a fetish, he must have wanted them to fulfill some kinky, psychologically aberrant he had for exotic Orientalness. But why? Who decided it was normal to be attracted to blondes and Jews and Republicans, but not to Asian women? Why was “fetish”, with its connotation of sex...
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  How had that happened? He couldn’t remember making the switch; was it like falling off a cliff, and one day, he’d still loved these quirks and the next, he woke up hating them? Or did the charm wear off bit by bit, like a new car’s scent, declining linearly with each hour of the marriage’s aging until he’d crossed the line without even noticing? One hour, the tiniest bit likable, neutral the next, the tiniest bit annoying the following, and in ten years, it’d sink to the level of repulsive, and in thirty, I’ll-take-an-ax-to-your-head-if-you-don’t-shut-the-fuck-up detestable?
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Young had nodded, but she hadn’t really grasped how Teresa could look happy, be happy, when her life was, by any objective measure, so hard and tragic. But now, kissing Pak’s cheek to wake him for dinner, seeing him smile as he said: “You made my favorite. That smells wonderful”—she understood. It was why all the studies showed that rich people who should be the happiest—CEOs, lottery winners, Olympic champions—weren’t, in fact, the happiest, and why the poor and disabled weren’t necessarily the most depressed: you got used to your life, whatever accomplishments and troubles it happened to hold, and adjusted your expectations accordingly.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Young saw it then: tears streaming down her face, her eyes closed in bliss so complete that she couldn’t contain it. Couldn’t keep her lips from stretching so wide, her molars showed. Teresa kissed Rosa’s forehead. Not a peck this time, but a lingering savoring of Rosa’s skin against her lips.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  You lived in the same house, but the intimacy was gone, replaced by aloofness, with splashes of annoyance. Like an addition, you could go for years without it, but you never forget it, never stopped missing in, and when you get a dab of it, like now, you craved it more and wanted to gorge on it.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  This was what the people had come for. Not just the gore, though there was that—the blow-up photo and the charred remains of the equipment—but the drama of tragedy. Matt saw it every day in the hospital: broken bones, car accidents, cancer scars, People cried about it, sure—the pain, the unfairness, the inconvenience of it all—but there were always one or two in every family who got energized by being at the periphery of suffering, every cell in their bodies vibrating at a slightly higher frequency, woken from the mundane dormancy of their everyday lives.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  And now the mom was gone, leaving a sunflower with no center disk to hold up the petals.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Americans were so proud of things being a few hundred years old, as if things being old were a value in and of itself. (Of course, this philosophy did not extend to people.) They didn’t seem to realize that the world valued America precisely because it was not old, but modern and new.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Miracle Creek was insular, with longtime residents (going back generations, they said). She thought they might be slow to warm, so she focused on befriending one family nearby who’d seemed especially nice. But over time, she realized: they weren’t nice; they were politely unfriendly. Young knew the type. Her own mother had belonged to this breed of people who used manners to cover up unfriendliness the way people used perfume to cover up body order—the worse it was, the more they used.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  It’s strange, I know, that my mind keeps returning to this particular lapse, given my bigger, more blameworthy mistake of that night. Perhaps it’s precisely its smallness, its seeming insignificance, that gives it power and fuels the what-ifs.
• 卡复卡

  2019-05-23
  Did he think so much had already happened that nothing more could? But life doesn’t work like that. Tragedies don’t inoculate you against further tragedies, and misfortune doesn’t get sprinkled out in fair proportions; bad things get hurled at you in clumps and batches, unmanageable and messy.