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The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"The Solace of Open Spaces"
It’s May and I’ve just awakened from a nap, curled against sagebrush the way my dog taught me to sleep—sheltered from wind. A front is pulling the huge sky over me, and from the dark a hailstone has hit me on the head. I’m trailing a band of two thousand sheep across a stretch of Wyoming badlands, a fifty-mile trip that takes five days because sheep shade up in hot sun and won’t budge until it’s cool. Bunched together now, and excited into a run by the storm, they drift across dry land, tumbling into draws like water and surge out again onto the rugged, choppy plateaus that are the building blocks of this state.
The Solace of Open Spaces : Essays -
The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"The Smooth Skull of Winter"
On the winter solstice it is thirty-four degrees below zero and there is very little in the way of daylight. The deep ache of this audacious Arctic air is also the ache in our lives made physical. Patches of frostbite show up on our noses, toes, and ears. Skin blisters as if cold were a kind of radiation to which we’ve been exposed. It strips what is ornamental in us. Part of the ache we feel is also a softness growing. Our connections with neighbors—whether strong or tenuous, as lovers or friends—become too urgent to disregard. We rub the frozen toes of a stranger whose pickup has veered off the road; we open water gaps with a tamping bar and an ax; we splice a friend’s frozen water pipe; we take mittens and blankets to the men who herd sheep. Twenty or thirty below makes the exchange of breath visible: all of mine for all of yours. It is the tacit way we express the intimacy no one talks about.
The Solace of Open Spaces : Essays -
The Solace of Open SpacesEssaysFrom"A Storm, the Cornfield, and Elk"
Today the sky is a wafer. Placed on my tongue, it is a wholeness that has already disintegrated; placed under the tongue, it makes my heart beat strongly enough to stretch myself over the winter brilliances to come. Now I feel the tenderness to which this season rots. Its defenselessness can no longer be corrupted. Death is its purity, its sweet mud. The string of storms that came across Wyoming like elephants tied tail to trunk falters now and bleeds into a stillness.
There is neither sun, nor wind, nor snow falling. The hunters are gone; snow geese waddle in grainfields. Already, the elk have started moving out of the mountains toward sheltered feed-grounds. Their great antlers will soon fall off like chandeliers shaken from ballroom ceilings. With them the light of these autumn days, bathed in what Tennyson called “a mockery of sunshine,” will go completely out.
The Solace of Open Spaces : Essays
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The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of MindA Novel
It was true that Eva’s male colleagues had by now ceased to joke among themselves that a hopeless crush on Professor Mueller ought to be included among the requirements for the major in philosophy, but this was not because the students no longer fell in love with her. They did, at a rate which had of course slackened over the years but was still not inconsiderable. It was an irony—of course quite lost on Eva, who was steadfastly oblivious to the dramas in which she figured—that many who sat raptly listening to their professor’s lectures on the “futility of the passions,” on the need to transform the passive emotions directed towards objects and people outside ourselves into the active emotions of the intellect, were swollen with an advanced case of that same passive desire whose elimination was being eloquently, even passionately, urged upon them.
The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of Mind : A Novel -
The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of MindA Novel
The hands of the women lingered over their tumescent bellies. A girl no more than fifteen sat beside Eva. She was obviously in an advanced state. Her skinny, childish legs in cheap sky-blue summer pants dangled down from her engorged womb. Eva stared in disbelief at the bulge of it. The thing quivered, and the girl giggled at Eva, making a motion of swimming. Eva fought down the surge of acrid sickness, averting her eyes from the sight.
She sat all afternoon, as women came and went. There was no receptionist; patients were called in by the doctor himself.
The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of Mind : A Novel -
The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of MindA Novel
It was in this first book that Eva came upon a reference to Joseph Goebbels’ children. Gisevius made a passing, cynical reference to the presence of the Goebbels children at one of those fêtes the Nazis were such masters at creating, Hitler’s fiftieth birthday party perhaps. “There were the inevitable Goebbels children, trotted out once more for display.” Yes, she could remember them. There had been six of them. They had been pointed out to her once, at some sort of celebration, very very large. Perhaps it had even been that massive birthday party for Hitler! They had been standing on the podium, beside their mama and papa, dressed all in white. She could not really remember how their famous papa had looked. She had only stared at the beautiful children, the six shining specimens of Aryan perfection.
“Look,” Mama had said, “look at how beautiful and good they are.”
The Late Summer Passion of A Woman of Mind : A Novel
Selected Works
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LocasA Novel
Any time Manny wanted to sell a gun or a big load of weed he’d hand the deal over to one of his main boys. Manny called Chico, Beto, and Paco, then Chevy and Rafa, his right hands cause they was ready to slice open an enemy or blood up a buyer that didn’t pay up, and so they got the juiciest sheep and the most money. Got the most room on the street. The rest of the Lobos was just taggers or third-raters. Tagger babies are the locos who sprayed our sets all over town so people know we own it. They’d dog around here with their spray paint cans and their fake-tough faces, bragging how they did a job up on the freeway signs or almost got busted by the police for messing up a mural. “Hey, homes!” they’d laugh out to each other. “You see the job I did? Got up twenty feet that time!”
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas : A Novel -
LocasA Novel
In this town a woman doesn’t have a hundred choices. Can’t make yourself into a man, right? Can’t even pick up and cruise on out of here just because you get some itch. And even though people talk all about doing college, that’s just some dream they got from watching too much afternoon TV. No. A woman’s got her place if she’s a mama. That makes her a real person, where before she was just some skinny or fat little girl with skin like brown dirt, not worth a dime, not anybody to tip your hat to. But even if the government checks start coming in because you had little José or little Blanca, having a baby’s no free ride.
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas : A Novel -
LocasA Novel
Everybody’s thinking, Where’s the blade, man? Who gets it? But you can’t tell. They’re just pounding on each other’s heads with fists, rolling and making grunts, and I wanted to know who the patrón was so bad that I had to close my eyes for a minute and just listen to them fighting, sounded the same as when a butcher breaks up his meat. But when they don’t stop, when one boy don’t bend over dead right away, we knew. Manny dropped the knife.
LOCAS © 1997 by Yxta Maya Murray; reprinted with the permission of the publisher, Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Locas : A Novel