More on: kindness

Imagine yourself an old wolf: lean and ragged, belly shrunken beneath a ribcage as bowed as a galleon’s undercarriage, shoulders broader than your painful hips, and paws the size of a lion’s. You terrify each living thing you encounter, voles and rats ducking into holes, rabbits humping their soft backs, propelled under bushes by back…

No you’re not a saint because you spare the maid a stubborn skid mark by swiping the bowl clean with an oven-mitt- sized toilet-paper wad during the one mid-flush moment between water’s vanishing and return before you step under the turbo multi-jet gleaming steaming solid-brass showerhead so brilliantly designed to make you feel exactly as…

THE TASTE OF GRAPES was the taste south of his grandmother’s garage back home. Small as marbles, green and sour skinned—when you bit them, the skins spilt and squirted the globe of flesh into your mouth, smooth and soft; if there were any sweetness, this is where you would find it. He could not define…

I ran down the emergency-room ramp, holding Jon in one arm, pressing the cut with the other, and passed through the sliding glass doors into a narrow corridor lined with Saturday-night gurneys and men and one woman, all slumped or lying down on the black and white checkered tile, all clutching what seemed concussions and…

On a road that cuts through the richest, non-irrigated land in the nation, according to some Lancaster, PA, natives, a minivan slowed, and a woman with a good haircut yelled, Do you want a ride, or are you walking because you want to? I didn’t reply because my life felt so wrecked— no matter the…

The morning after the blitzkrieg that toppled the vaults of Saint Michael’s Cathedral and set the rest on fire, a stonemason found among the embers one roof beam laid across another, a kind of crucifix created by the forces of accident and violence and then by grace of eyes that saw in them an order.…