Activity

—Let’s pretend we’re old, Lou remembered saying back when they were young. They had been watching hurricane waves rip the outer beach. To walk back they aligned adjacent legs like a pair in a three-legged race.

—Those days will come soon enough, Maytree said. His gravity had startled her. Now th…

The maple outside and his own face showed equally in the window. As a boy, Pete noticed that old people like Reevadare Weaver and Cornelius Blue could horrifyingly persist in oldness for decade after decade, no end in sight, without shame. Old people were those who lacked will to leave, or tact to …

Maybe lasting love is a rare evolutionary lagniappe.

Was romance hierophany, or some fowler’s snare that yanked a culture by the toe?

unless the premise—that there is such a thing as love, and it recurs—was false, so that apostasy was really a lapse into truth, like Galileo’s.