I will never be old. I will never be sad. I’d scarf a cyanide capsule first. Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on…
Catalog
Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff (born July 23, 1978) is an American novelist and short story writer. 2Biography Groff was born and raised in Cooperstown, New York. She graduated from Amherst College and from the University of Wisconsin–Madison with an MFA in fiction. 2Career Groff is the author of three novels and a short story collection. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, was published by Hyperion on February 5, 2008 and debuted on the New York Times bestseller list. It was well received by Stephen King, who read it before publication and wrote an early review in Entertainment Weekly. It was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers in 2008, and was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by Amazon.com and the San Francisco Chronicle. The Monsters of Templeton is a contemporary tale about coming home to Templeton, a representation of Cooperstown, New York. It is interspersed with voices from characters drawn from the town's history as well as James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers, which is also set in a fictionalized Cooperstown which he also calls Templeton. Groff has had short stories published in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Five Points, and Ploughshares, and the anthologies Best New American Voices 2008, Pushcart Prize XXXII, and Best American Short Stories 2007, 2010 and 2014 edition
A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping.
It comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true grief.
Outside, snow had fallen thigh-deep in the night. Something was deeply soothing about so much untouched white.
She didn’t tell him that she never minded being the breadwinner during the long span of their twenties. She did mind something she never said aloud: she’d wished her husband were better at what he chose to do. All of that standing in line in the rain. Going in only to perform a monologue. Home again…
Barely time to register the staggering beauty, and here it is. The separation.
The sky was all a strange boil, purplish black. Costume designers would stab their competitors to get their mitts on such a hue. Wearing it, one would walk onstage already great with authority, Lear or Othello before a syllable was spoken.
Oh, for the god of love, where did time go? Clockwise swirl going nowhere.
Lotto’s heart kicked froglike in his chest; sweeping toward him in her brilliant blue skirt, Mathilde. His azure lion rampant. Her long hair plaited down her left breast, she, the nexus of all the good of this world.
There is little that a puppy won’t fix, even if the fix is for a short time.
I will never be old. I’d scarf a cyanide capsule first. Life isn’t worth living unless you are young and surrounded by other young people in a beautiful cold garden perfumed by dirt and flowers and fallen leaves, gleaming in the string of lights, listening to the quiet city on the last fine night of…
He looked at her thoughtfully, gently bit the tip of her nose. He had loved her with all his might these two weeks and, in so loving, had considered her transparent, a plate of glass. He could see through to the goodness at her quick. But glass is fragile, he would have to be careful.
They step into each other and it’s hard to tell where one begins and one ends: hands in hair and warmth on warmth.
The word wife comes from the Proto-Indo-European weip. Weip means to turn, twist, or wrap. In an alternative etymology, the word wife comes from Proto-etc., ghwibh. Ghwibh means pudenda. Or shame.