Ill Shut Up...Right After This (A Gathering of Voices Book 4)

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I will live alone in the forest with my daughter until my savings run out. But for now I wrap myself in my fairy tales and nurse the wound that no one can see. Round and round, never stopping. So hard to find the door. My little girl is drowsy now, her bright cornsilk head nodding off against my black blouse.

Rocking her to sleep, I close my eyes. At moments like this, when the gibbous moon is rising and the kerosene lamp sputtering low, I can step out of this world, erase the past four years, erase the war. Tracing my way back up the long road that led me to this cabin, this loss. Gathering the scattered threads and weaving them together, as if on a magic loom.

Weaving them into a tale, my tale. This is how I mend what was broken, how I summon back the radiant thing I have lost. I was born in a forest even darker and more tangled than this one—in the Schwarzwald with its valleys deep as scars. Enclosed by precipitous hills, it got very little sunlight. I had just turned sixteen. Lashing rain had turned the village graveyard into a quagmire. I stared down the hole they were lowering my mother into.

A gash in the earth full of black water. I wondered if the coffin would leak, if the mud would stain the white paper rose I had placed between her fingers. Huddled under his umbrella, the priest spat out the final blessing as fast as he could. I did not hear a word of his mumbling. I was studying our family headstone. He had passed away last year. Above him, my brother, who had inherited his weak lungs.

At the very top was a string of five sisters, vague recollections. Babies who had died before they were old enough to leave the cradle. A cruel joke , I thought, that I was the only one who had survived. What would I do now? We had sold the farm to pay our debts. Cloudy water closed in around it. The hole seemed to beckon me. The ground beneath my feet was soggy, uneven. It would be so easy just to slip and fall into that dark wet place. Cling to the unvarnished coffin, a ship on an underground sea taking me to join the rest of them.

I wanted to cry, thought this would be so much easier if I could just throw back my head and bawl thunderously like a bad actress in a village play. But I could not. My eyes stayed dry. My tears would not come until much, much later. Uncle Peter, standing beside me and holding the umbrella over our heads, was crying in the choked silent way that men do. He was a bit of a laughingstock, a grown man who wept while his young niece remained stoic, this man who lived only for his books, who slept in the schoolhouse for lack of a proper home.

I let them go without me. The thought of food made my stomach clench like a fist. The thought of all those people gawking at me to see how I was coping. I wanted to hide in the forest like an animal. My uncle sat on the back pew and stared into his handkerchief with red swollen eyes, while I paced up and down the aisle, my arms folded in front of me, wondering how much of a mess I could make with my trail of dirty footprints.

Summit Avenue: Book Excerpt

I found my eyes resting on the statue of the Virgin, her sweet tender face bent to the child in her arms. Swinging around sharply, I marched to the back of the church and sat beside my uncle, who took my hand. How could his hand be so warm? Mine was cold as a marble slab. All the fire had gone out inside me. I thought I would never be warm again, thought the blood inside my veins would freeze.

My uncle looked at me, his damp hair falling in his face. I brushed it back for him, and he put his arm around me. At first I thought he was joking. I turned away from him, looking at the cheap oil prints of the stations of the cross. America was a myth to me. Like the North Pole. As distant as the place my mother had gone to. Five years ago my cousin Lotte had gone over. She had sent a few picture postcards of tall buildings like the spires of cathedrals, then silence. America was a place that swallowed you up, and you were never heard from again. You can live with Lotte. Anyone with half a brain can find work over there.

I turned to him again, wrapping my arms around his neck, pressing my face against his wet wool coat. Already his voice sounded like it was coming from the other end of the world. You put the other children to shame. Pregnant every other year until my father died. By that time her body had been too broken to make much use of her widowhood.

It ( film) - Wikiquote

Too bright for this place. I thought again of my mother. Wipe it from your memory. Learn English as fast as you can. A vast sweep of brick warehouses and factories flew past me. Smokestacks reared into the air. It was so flat here. The sky had never seemed so close. My first view of Minneapolis was from the window of a moving train. We crossed a bridge over the Mississippi, brown and wide, with flat-bottomed barges carrying timber. When I stepped off the train, I saw a woman in her early twenties who was holding a piece of cardboard with my name scrawled across it in red crayon.

I made my way toward her, this strange American who was the cousin I had not seen in five years. She wore a shiny pink dress with ruffles around the neck. Her waist was so tiny, cinched by her corset, I could have fit my hands around it, but her bosom rose above it, heavy, and powerful. With a figure like hers, she belonged in the country. Baking bread and raking hay with her strong arms.

How out of place she looked here, standing in a railway station with paint on her face. At home if you painted yourself, they called you a loose woman. Back in our village, only men smoked. I stopped a few feet in front of her, put down my suitcase, held out my hand for her to shake.

Wondering what I could possibly say to her and whether I should say it in English or German. But my cousin made things simple. Come along, we have to catch the streetcar. I hope you have a nickel for the fare. When Lotte said mill, I pictured the old water mill in our village. The mills were clustered around St. Anthony Falls, straddling both sides of the Mississippi.

They spewed smoke and pumped out that same yeasty odor I had noticed yesterday on the train. Of course , I thought. This must be the smell of flour. She led me through an iron door into one of those brick fortresses. Red-faced, blue-shirted men pushed trolleys of grain. Watching them, I felt like a child at a fair.

Even their curses sounded wondrous and strange, because they were in American English. I sneezed on the flour dust, which seemed to permeate every inch of the corridor. Like pollen, like snow in summer. The smell of flour and machine oil filled my lungs. Walls of bare brick, grimy skylights at the very top. I thought how hot it would be in summer, how cold in winter. The wooden floor was littered with fabric scraps, dust balls, and odd bits of thread that got caught on the hem of my skirt.

This was like a giant schoolroom, except where there should have been desks, there were sewing machines, women and girls hunched over them. Some of them looked so young—twelve or thirteen—but they already had the hooded, dark-circled eyes of old women. They were speaking all languages, not just American. They were pumping the foot pedals of their sewing machines like someone trying to ride a bicycle up an impossibly steep hill. If you break a needle, they dock your wages. If you break the machine, they make you pay for it.

You get five cents for each finished bag, so if you want to bring in five dollars a week, you better get cracking. I sat on the wobbly wooden chair. The seat, at least, was comfortable, worn smooth and deep by the seamstresses before me. Too transfixed to listen, I stared at the sign on the far wall, the red letters big enough to be seen from every corner of the room. I tried to decipher the foreign words. What a name for a sewing machine!

A firebird rising from the ashes. Have you never seen a sewing machine before? Her foot flew to the pedal, then the needle burst into motion, the bobbins oscillating wildly. A blur of white and silver. The rattle and hum of two hundred Phoenix brand sewing machines in the same room. Two hundred women and girls sewing away like mad. I gave my cousin one last desperate look, but her face was a mask of concentration.

The dots of rouge on her cheeks stood out like streetcar lamps. I found myself staring at her pink taffeta blouse with its plunging neckline, displaying her breasts like melons at a market stall. Sewing straight seams to make flour bags. The task sounded simple enough. At home I had sewn complicated things by hand.

Smocked blouses, gathered skirts, embroidered chemises. Smoothing the fabric out, aligning it to the path of the needle, I put my foot on the pedal. At first so lightly that nothing happened. Then I put a bit more weight on it, started pumping it back and forth. The needle moved up and down like a hen pecking seeds. I moved the fabric along. My hands were trembling. I was practically biting my bottom lip off. Straight seams, any fool should be able to do this. I started pumping faster, trying to get into the rhythm of it. I broke into a sweat, the back of my dress sticking to my shoulder blades like wet leaves.

The blur of silver as the needle speeded up, the fabric bunching underneath it, the thread bunching together, the needle jamming.

I took my foot off the pedal and examined my handiwork. A string of swear words emerged from my lips, a vocabulary I had never even known I possessed. Lotte lifted her foot from her pedal, dug a seam ripper out of her pocket. He was screaming at me in a language half-foreign, half-familiar. Will you hold my head above the water when it's rising so fast?

I've never known any other that could make me feel so blessed. Jezebel, I can hear you moaning in my head. As I toss and turn, you do the same thing in some new lovers bed, while I'm wishing I was dead. Did the heart that was so soft just turn to lead? It might be wrong, but I'm leaving. I'm gonna find me a wife, and it ain't hard to believe in love in a city of lights. It won't take long, because I'm leaving, I'm leaving tonight. Time will tell if I'm gonna make it through this little Hell, my prison cell.

The walls all seem to shrink and swell, in the apt. After all that I gave you, you still want to be so far away, so far away from me. Come back to me. Lift my head out of my hands, and I'm begging you to say, "Would you please take me home with you? And if you want, we can go out tonight and be alone. And if you want, we can stay in tonight, be at home, let the whole wide world just worry about its own.

I'm sure I'll give you plenty of reasons to leave but you won't.

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No, you won't leave me hanging. We spring from and return to the earth but in between, you will always belong to me. It's you and me, a nation of two. Let's do what we please, let's love what we do. When the morning comes, we will wake, and the sun will kiss your beautiful face. And if you want to know the truth, I can say "You are my favorite part of every day. Just open up your arms to me, and don't make no vow you can't keep, and I'll lay my pride down at your feet. Because neither the heavens nor the earth can equal what you're worth. I would fall apart if I didn't have your heart.

I know you would too. We make our lives worth living when we love each other. Yeah, we can move the mountains with our love. You whisper you love me in my ear. When you tell me you love me, suddenly, I'm not scared. You've got me right where you want me and I will stay here, because when you tell me you love me, suddenly, I'm not scared. I made an expedition through a country that's not my own, crossed the mountains and swam the river, and found I was still alone.

And I came across the desert trying to make life a metaphor, but there was no one there to share my wisdom with, so I moved along. I thought, "If you really want to love somebody, it will cost you more than you have. I can guarantee you that. So I turned to education, and sought understanding of human kind. Stood on the shoulders of prudent giants, just trying to glimpse the light.

But the shadow is overwhelming, it buries good men beneath the sand, so I reached out for a savior and I found her hand. If you really want to love somebody, it will cost you more than you have. I can guarantee you that it's worth every bit. I can guarantee you that! I can guarantee that there's nothing in this life that has ever felt so right. And there's nothing in this world except you and me. And there's no one in this life quite like the two of us. And there's no one in this world quite like the two of us.

Take what you need but you better need all you take, because there's fire in the mountain, there's a ghost in the lake. So when the devil comes calling, you'd better send him away, son. Get your ambitions all squared in your head, when you start feeling anxious you get out of your bed, because if your heart's full of dancing, you'd better dance til you're dead. You better stop and smell the roses. You better love the life you live, and you'd better take note of when it's killing you, because we all end up at the cemetery. So make way for the modern Adonis in me, as he screams to the clouds, "Oh when will I be complete?!?

So get to the city as fast as you can and find you a good woman to hold your dirty hands, because all the whores that you've had; they'll never make you a man. Well, I'll hold my breath when I take your hand to try and make the moment expand and wrap my head around the epic truth, that there is nothing I can do, I'll always be in love with you. Though they say a man must be an island, it didn't take me long to realize that, my lady, you are like the ocean and the obvious is true, there is no me if there's no you. Lord, I'm on borrowed time the story of my life. Yeah, we're gonna make it work.

Yeah, we're gonna make it last for a while. I know it happens all the time but it's our thing that we're doing. Just like the sun is going to rise up, our love keeps it moving. Seal my fate with a photograph, that our kids will look back on and laugh and they won't believe that we ever were young. But right now I've got bags underneath my eyes, and it looks like they mean to stay this time because I've been tired since the second that I woke up.

Lately I've been so terrified of everything that I plan to try, and as I carve my name deep into the earth I wonder why I do all the things I do when I just want to hang around with you. I can hold you up and I won't let you down. And we would be content. There will be food on the table and we will love our neighbors. Yeah, we will trust our neighbors. It never makes a difference.

Well, it rarely makes a difference. Oh Lord, I love you so, but you've been misrepresented. Although, your flock does grow under these false pretenses. It leaves me feeling cold.

It leaves me feeling faithless because our scars both new and old, they never seem to shame us. So you can spend your days on your hands and knees, by evening time, I hope you've found some peace. Salute my sisters; salute my brothers, out on the front line for the politics of others. Lord, bring them home with their ammunitions full. Lord, bring them home. Because when it's over, I'm not looking for rebirth. Just dress my bones up and lay them in the earth. I need the rest. Oh lord, I need the rest. And I'm just waiting for the bells to start a' tolling, across the river where the water's overflowing.

And maybe life is like the autumn trees, and I'm just one of many very mortal leaves. Just praying to the fates that we survive the freeze. But there's at least a hundred reasons why I should go to heaven when I die, so I'll just sit and patiently await my time. I don't know anything about it so I let it go. Because when it's over I'm not looking for rebirth. Can it really be the same for everybody? And no one really can predict the rest; what's gonna happen to us after death. Sit me down and say you're having a baby. You caught me off of my guard.

Like the time you smashed my thumb with a hammer and then Dad came running through the yard. You had faith that even I could one day be made whole and I know it's a pain how I can act like I know everything. You and I could read the scriptures daily and we'd still probably never agree. You say Joshua was a mighty leader, well, he's still an asshole to me. So I've come to realize that having such a tender heart, it's a curse as much as it's a blessing, right?

The second that you came around, I knew that we would work because we were golden like southern California. All my life, I've waited for a love that could not be ignored in good conscience, a love I could ascend to. So let's never let our day jobs get us down. Throw your hands up and throw all your inhibitions out. I don't really see the problem with it. I've been working hard, you see. I dirtied my hands on the necks of old identities, all the things I used to be. Because love is like the angry sea and I've been drowned and baptized it's the same to me, when they pull you underneath.

But pretty soon I'll be coming home, so just try and do your best to stay cool. We are old and new, we have been refined. We have held our tongues for the longest time. So hit them with everything that you have. Let them all go tumbling, tumbling. Oh, I always knew that you were something else. When will you turn around? The truth is that everybody that I love may or may not be happy soon but I wouldn't waste my time on loving someone else, if you don't love yourself.

I'm tired but I won't be sleeping. Stay in with me for the evening. We are something I believe in. Now, if I can just never let you down. I can hear our wedding bells ringing almost a year after the thing. I still hear the stereo playing loud, "Oh, Yoko" as we walked out. And when you're holding me tight, we both realize that we are just getting warmed up. Here, it's just me and you, our nation of two. Because love is less what you say and more what you do and who you spend the rest of your life with. I'm gonna spend mine with you. Oh, lover, hear me call when I'm drowning in the 9 to 5 of this town.

We're all just working to live but only you can comfort me. Well, hear me out. And we throw our hopes around, they never mean much. My power was so powerful and new. So I'll chalk this up to all the stupid things that I've done, and all the stupid things that I'll do. Do you lie awake, and worry about the future? Because you're just as safe as you ever were. We're running out of time. We're marching on but we are not alive. I wish you'd climb down off your cross and burn it.

Family Guy/Season 10

If it's not doing any good then we could use the wood that it provides us. That you denied us. Is it such a sin to want to save our skin from the mess we've made Or was it arrogance? Oh, what's the difference? Can anybody tell the sick from the well? If you're throwing in with these greedy men that pull all the strings and ruin everything Well, who wants to live forever in these dying lands with these dirty hands? So lift your hands up from your sides, rinse them both off with your pride, and let the world see what we're not.

Because we have carved out our desires, and placed them in the hands of liars that will forget you when they want. And let there be no sacred lands. With one final song and dance, let our clean hands know the earth. We'll build a culture, brave and strong, we won't rely on anyone, and all our souls will know their worth. Pave the way, we are modern men, and we have fought to exist. We have crawled from the water to the dry land, and our hands are the dirtiest. But I'm alive and the sun is shining in! Oh, I have fought to exist. I have crawled from the water to the dry land, and my hands are the dirtiest.

I'm alive and the sun is shining in! Oh, my belly has been filled. I have seen everything a body can see, and my hands are the dirtiest. I'm gonna count my blessings. I'm gonna count my sacred things, like the baby I caught smiling at me, or how my lady loves me effortlessly. Oh, there must be a god, somewhere in the universe.

May be looking after me. Yeah, he may be smiling down on me. You're heartstrings all came undone when she left you out in the sun. Well, what did you think it would feel like to be in love? You're heartaches have served you well. If you're anxious, I just can't tell. Well, how many times did you want to be in love? There must be something wrong, if all the people on the streets are all confessing your conceit, but you won't. Your tongue was forked and long, and it got you feeling strong, but all the apologies I made I should've taken to the grave and been done.

So take your bottle off the shelf and try and drink until it helps but it won't. Won't you please just lay me down in the old familiar ground? Won't you please just lay me down? And certain men may love, and certain men may love the fight, and they'll break their bodies But life is what you make, so write these words above my grave, "They took me for granted. Because love is what you've made it, and I made it my friend!

Because there's so much at stake, when you try to live life half awake. I made my mistakes, but I cut them loose, and I'm trying to hold on to hope. I happened upon a girl with a love too big for her heart, so she rented it out to the boys who needed her quick. Then when she was old she thought that she felt death in her soul. Her heart had grown cold from all the nights that it spent alone, trying to hold on to hope To hold on to hope, that this wouldn't be quite what she needs.

Cause I fell just like all the rest. I was too broke down to fly. Take a chance on me Daddy, this may be all we got. The night be black and the road may be long. Your voice may crack and it all sounds wrong. Now taste those tears. It seems your luck has all been shot. No use asking why.

But sooner or later we all have to try. Everything you ever tried to be was just a fantasy. All you ever needed was someone to tell you you were right. And all you ever wanted was to put off some of your own light. There you are, singing Desperado in the car at night. There you are, with everybody looking up at you. I had a baby but the good lord took her. She was an angel but her wings were crooked. I guess he figured he could love her better than me. Some girls marry and some girls wait.

Some do better without that ball and chain…singing… Oh me, Oh my tell me it gets easier with time. With the way you drink and the brows you raise. You can bet they wonder how the bills get paid, when you dance all night and you sleep all day. Girl when you gonna settle down, and make your mama proud? Oh no, not now. They say the good times go too fast. Edge of the Frame. And you make a scene, you get your picture in a magazine. Why you make a beggar out of your best friend. Oh heaven knows, you love to dress me up in ribbons and bows.

I go to get myself a coffee and everybody stares at me. They know you treat me awful mean. When the mailman brings the letters he tries to talk some sense to me. I tell myself over and over I should be getting out of here. So listen Honey and believe me, cause this is all I got to say… Anyone would have to be a fool to love you like I do.

He was forty-six with the wife and the kids and the job with the suit and the tie. Oh but I, I wanna be your child again. I wanna remember when everything was new. And damn this pride that lives inside the hearts of men. I wanna be whole again. I passed a truck filled with old street signs, it seemed like one of them was mine, a long long time ago, before I knew you Caroline. Now the bus is leaving, wish I could stay. Oh Carolina, oh Carolina. You know I love you in my way. We sat out on the front steps and shared a cigarette. We watched the neighbors go to bed.

They fed the dog and shut the lights, and we were on our own again. But as the sun began to rise. We were running out of shadows to hide ourselves behind. Would you love me one more time, before we raise the blinds and make the bed?

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